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New Mac Pro, fast drives, dropped frames on playback
Hi, all,
Took some advice, bought new Mac Pro, got rid of firewire drives, put raid 0 on 3 internal Seagates, now get 150 to 200 MB/s on the Kona system test. Using HDV in a few cases but mostly DVCPRO HD. On playback FCP (either codec) drops frames every few minutes. No consistent locations on the timeline. No other programs running, did audio mixdown. No network attached. Kona 3 in right slot, setup according to instructions.
Deadline upon us, disaster awaits if we cannot go to tape soon without dropped frames.
I must be installing something wrong or using the wrong timeline settings or something. But all those things check out. Please tell me this is something simple I’ve foolishly forgotten.
Any help?
Thanks,
Mike
Mac Pro 2.66
4 GB memory
Kona 3
250 GB boot drive, 100 GB free
3-750 Seagates in Raid 0, 1 TB free
OS 10.4.9
FCP 5.1.4
QT 7.1.5 -
19 Replies
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Are you sure your media is on your RAID? Just asking because FCP will default the Scratch Disk to the same drive the application is on if you don’t change it.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi
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Trashed your prefs?
Peter
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Are you getting dropped frame error messages?
Are you watching an external HD monitor or are you watching canvas/viewer/digital cinema desk top preview?
George
Light Images -
Many thanks for the responses.
I frequently trash the prefs, using FCPRescue. I use the Kona card to monitor the output on a Dell, and I turn off mirroring on the desktop. I did all these things before I wrote the first post, but to no avail.
One possibility that you raise, Walter: I’m pretty careful to reset the scratch disks after the prefs are trashed, but now that I look, I see that a few render files are on the system disk. I get 50MB/s on that one, so I wouldn’t think it would have an effect, particularly with the HDV at less than 4 MB/s, but it’s sure worth a try. I’ll fix that and report back.
Thanks.
Mike
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[Mike Parfit] “but now that I look, I see that a few render files are on the system disk. I get 50MB/s on that one, so I wouldn’t think it would have an effect, particularly with the HDV at less than 4 MB/s, but it’s sure worth a try. I’ll fix that and report back”
Absolutely can have an effect since that drive is running the OS, the Application and trying to play your media at the same time. NEVER put any media on your system disk.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi
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Thanks, Walter, but unfortunately it made no difference. I moved or trashed every piece of media on the system disk, trashed the prefs again, set the scratch disks to the raid, rendered audio. But it only took FCP about 30 seconds to have its first dropped frames. (By the way, I am getting the dropped frames warning; I’m not just seeing bumps.)
Anything else I can do?
Thanks,
Mike
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Have you tried rendering out a self contained movie of your timeline and then trying to lay that off to tape?
Peter
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[Mike Parfit] “3-750 Seagates in Raid 0, 1 TB free”
Mike,
Although I heard they had possibly fixed the issues, the Seagate 750gb “perpendicular” drives were creating problems when stripped together in a raid configuration. If you have an external firewire 800 drive in your shop, I’d export a QT of the project to that drive and test it for dropped frames. If it works output using that drive, and you will then want to dig deeper into the three drive raid and see if those drives are causing the problem for you.
DRW
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Be sure that on your drive (except the system drive) the journal is not enabled.
Martial
Vancouver Island Final Cut Pro User Group
Martial Bachoffner
Founder and Administrator -
Although I heard they had possibly fixed the issues, the Seagate 750gb “perpendicular” drives were creating problems when stripped together in a raid configuration
Holy smoke! I had no idea. I thought I’d been reading here fairly carefully, but maybe not. Isn’t that a ripe irony? People have been telling me for months on this forum and others to get rid of the firewire stuff and invest in an array of Seagates, and now this? I thought everyone was using these drives in their Sonnet and CalDigit arrays.
Is anyone else having these issues, and if so would we who are using highly compressed formats be better just going back to individual drives at 50MB/s?
Meanwhile I’ll try to run my show as a QuickTime on my old FW 800. What fun.
Thanks,
Mike
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