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Render Files going offline
Hi,
I’m working on a show right now, cutting on FCP and using the Facilis TerraBlock storage system. We are repeatedly having issues with render files that seem to just disappear. I finished work yesterday, left my 43:30 sequence totally rendered but when the AE opened it, a huge portion of the sequence was un-rendered. When I opened the project today, the “media offline” dialogue box popped up and I was missing a ton of render files. We have three systems hooked up to the TerraBlock and we’ve all been experiencing this problem. It happens both when you open a project in a different room as well as when you open it in the room it originated in. Last night was particularly weird because the AE opened my project probably less than a half an hour after I left.
We’re working on FCP 6.0.5, 2×2.66 dual-core, 8 GB RAM.
Has anyone else encountered this problem, and more importantly, does anyone know of a solution?
Thanks.
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5 Replies
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this is a problem we had on our SAN for a long time.
make sure you have a main project folder on the drive, say “Show 001” and make sure your capture scratch, audio render, and render scratch for that project is set to INSIDE this main folder.
If you have a “render files” at the root of the drive and have multiple people sharing the drive that’s when we were seeing render files go offline. It’s one little thing I’d love to have in FCP: a more forceful scratch disk dialogue – like AVID. Your project was always linked to a specific place… it’s all to easy to get lazy and end up with files all over your computer.
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Thanks Aaron. I’m going to give that a try now.
I should also mention that we’re cutting in Apple ProRes HQ. I don’t know if that’s contributing to the problem, but we’re switching to DVCPRO HD from the next episode on.
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ProRes is definitely not the problem. I’m curious why you would switch to DVCPRO? ProRes might be a little fatter datawise, but I find the full raster frame much easier to use when going out and back from after effects, etc….
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Shows that I’ve worked on in the past had issues while rendering ProRes, some similar to the ones we’re having now. We were able to work much more smoothly when we switched over to DVCPRO HD. It was like night and day. I don’t know if it’s just coincidence but I just feel like it’s a more stable codec (maybe I’ve just been unlucky with ProRes in the past). It’s also the format it was originally shot on.
I do agree though, the frame size can get annoying.
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that’s true – prores does have some eccentricities that need to be worked out. dvcpro is pretty tried and true
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