At wits end

[John Pale]

Your specs should be more than adequate for DVCPROHD. Until recently upgrading to a mac pro, I ran a Dual 2.0 G5 and it worked fine. Pro Res in HD was out of the question, but DVCPRO HD worked fine.

Some things to consider…is your drive nearly full? Drives slow down dramatically when they fill up.

Change your multiclip setting to “1-up” for final playback. This basically deactivates the other angles (you will see the green bar disappear off your timeline).

Make sure your Kona is in the correct slot.

Try turning off realtime scopes. I found this cleared up playback problems with large DVCPRO HD timelines, as it’s processor intensive.

Some things to check

[David Roth weiss]

[doug pagano] “I have a Lacie Biggest drive array striped correctly running on e-sata.”

What percentage of free space remains on this raid?

Have you run the AJA read/write test on the raid? That’s the only meaningful way to determine if the raid is delivering proper throughput.

[doug pagano] “I have trashed preferences, added RAM, Cleaned up the hard drive, removed all peripherals, Changed unlimited RT to safe and back again…”

That’s a start. Now do the following:

1) Repair permissions using the Apple Disk Utility

2) Run Disk Warrior on all drives. If you don’t have Disk Warrior either get it or find a new profession. You can’t run big jobs without it.

If the above don’t help, report back, I have additional and even more thorough maintenance procedures for you if necessary.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Doug Pagano]

Thanks for the input thus far. Here is the result of my AJA Sys test: 4GB File at DVCProHD 720p60 with write values of 126.2 MB/s and read values of 123.4 MB/s. (Seems ok to me) I have a 2.5TB array with 460GB free. I did the permissions suggestion but no I don’t have disc warrior. 23 years of this and I guess i need to go find a job selling shoes…or maybe I’ll just post this project on my AVID. Seriously though…I’ll be happy to run warrior on it if you honestly feel that is the fix. In my early days on the media 100 I remember having to do similar, although if I remember correctly it was part of the Mac utilities. If your other suggestions may be done before warrior let me know as the boss sometimes doesn’t like to spend money 🙂

[David Roth weiss]

Doug,

Don’t go selling shoes right away, there’s still hope. Disk Warrior straightens out boatloads of things on the Mac. BTW, I don’t ever bandy about things that are unproven, and when I say DW is one of the best $99 investments a Mac owner can make, I really mean it.

Also, if all else fails, it might be time to pull out the secret weapon that I seldom divulge, i.e. Applejack. It’s a free download that runs at boot on a Mac under Unix. If none of the other things work, install Applejack and write down the instructions on how to run it – ie. hold down the “s” key when booting and at the prompt type “applejack auto restart” and hit enter. AJ cleans out all Unix caches and essentially puts your computer back into the shape it was in the day you bought it, but without doing anything harmful or destructive.

Report back please…

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Matt Lyon]

Just to add a thought into the mix: have you verified that you\’ve properly set the render scratch directory to your esata drive? If you are rendering to a slower internal drive or the system drive, that could be the culprit. Also, does your system drop frames randomly, or always at the same spot in the timeline? That could point to a corrupt render file if the second case is true.

Matt Lyon
Editor
Toronto

[Zane Barker]

Unrelated to your actual question you will find that you get much more help when your subject line on a question gives the reader a good feeling about what the post is going to be about.

It also helps other people when they do searches.

There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity!

[Doug Pagano]

Thanks all.
In order…
I’m pretty anal about what goes into my computers but having said that I believe there has been a performance decline over the past few months. DW may be the option. THANKS

Matt…My scratch render is on my RAID and unfortunately the problem is intermitent (sorry to swear) I have deleted all render files and re-rendered entire timeline.

Zane…Right on. I did however spent about 2 hours reading all the posts on dropped frames during playback before posting, but you’re right…thanks for bringing that up

I’ll keep plugging forward and posting results, hopefully it’s some form of USER ERROR