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Baptism by Fire, on location
First, thanks to all who helped me get through my personal BBF with FCP. BBF is appropriate. It was hellish, and I feel born again now that it’s over. I really can’t thank you all enough — especially Steve Kahn, who helped me on-location with grace and humor, and David Weiss, who helped me long-distance.
The BBF was on-location editing, new Powerbook 17″, G-Tech Firewire drive, Canon GL-2.
The hard drive was pretty full (20 gigs free before digitizing), and it’s my understanding that FCP likes some room on the program drive, and that you get better and more reliable performance with media on a separate drive. So I really wanted a two-drive solution.
The plan was to plug everything in, digitizing from camera to the Firewire drive. That didn’t work, and I tried every permutation of daisy-chaining through the G-Tech and plugging into the PB’s two FW ports separately. I finally had to
1 – “eject” and physically disconnect the G-Tech,
2 – digitize via FW800 from camera to Macintosh internal drive,
3 – exit FCP,
4 – disconnect camera FW,
5 – plug in FW to G-Tech,
6 – copy digitized media to the G-Tech,
7 – put original media in trash,
8 – empty trash (otherwise FCP finds it there, without telling you it’s operating from the trash…)
9 – edit!Please comment. The above procedure worked, but it sure doesn’t seem like the best way. I’ll post a related question separately.
Thanks again to all who help educate us on this forum.
— BC
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3 Replies
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Bob,
What system are you running on the Powerbook? All specs would help. And yes, the drives should have at least 15% room in them. Plus, it helps to optimize or erase them from time to time.
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Well, Bob… It look like you have won an important battle! You can go to the mountain top and shout, “Hooray!”. I’m afraid that’s how we’ve all learned here on the COW and that’s exactly how products get updated. It takes people like us to have nightmarish situations and place our equipment in stiuations that it were not made for to get the companies to build bigger and better equipment. I applaud your efforts! You didn’t cave in and just buy the biggest and the best to get the job done. That’s always nice but not always necessary. I always enjoy hearing someone doing something with something that its not made for! That’s the good old TV way! Congrats on a job well done!
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions -
Bob,
It sounds like the missing ingredient was a cardbus FW card. The 2 built-in FW ports share the same buss, and you’ve
probably seen the dozens of threads here on the COW about the problems trying to share them. If you haven’t already,
buy a LaCie, or other brand, FW card today! I do location editing all the time on my PB. My setup is a 17″ 1.5g, a 2 drive
FW800 array (I made it from a FW depot enclosure with the Oxford 912 chip) and 2 400 gig drives, an AJA IO LA,
and a LCD monitor that displays VGA and NTSC and PAL. I don’t really need to do location editing, but when I get
a project overseas I bring that setup along so I can stay in whatever country a little longer and pretend I’m working.
At the studio if I’m editing a Beta-SP project I’ll use 8bit UC, but on-location I use the DV50 codec, which looks pretty good.
Ed
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