-
editing full res. on firewire 800 drives
I’m cutting a large project at full res., XD CAM 1080i60 and the crashes have become almost unbearable, I’ve been forced to autosave almost every 3 minutes because it’s gotten THAT bad…
The footage was given to us spread out across six 1TB drives, is it possible that it’s the daisy chain that has us crashing so much?
All the drives are less than three months old and we’ve already had problems with two of them dis-mounting themselves and struggling to come back online, so I’m wondering if they/FCP just can’t handle cutting a project at this resolution via firewire.
We’ve been budgeted room to buy 3TB worth of backups, so I’m wondering if a larger drive would eliminate some of these crashes or if the daisy chain is irrelevant.
Any advice on how to help prevent these crashes? I’ve tried collapsing my multiclips, freeing up extra space on the drives (past the usual 15%), and keeping as few sequences open as possible, but it doesn’t seem to be helping.
Also, we work in not just one project but across two–could that be the culprit?
S.O.S., help.
-
4 Replies
-
What kind of drives? Lacie? Internally raided? Western Digital? It sounds like 1) you have drives that are starting to fail or 2) drives that are going to sleep in-between edits
FW800 is plenty for XDCAM. I had a project that involved 8 FW800 drives all connected at once, DVCPRO-HD media, 4 drives per chain. It was fine.
-
Digital heavens discomnia can helped me!
Douglas Bogie Gray
Mirage TV
Edinburgh – Scotland -
The drives are standard G-Technology G-Drive Q’s–Do you think Lacie is better? Don’t have much experience with them, the company I’m working for has been dealing with G-Tech for a while and apparently switched from Lacie (we’ve got a whole bookshelf filled with deceased Lacie drives from older projects, so I just assumed they switched for a reason).
The failing drives theory makes sense to me, but it just baffles me because it means that we’re losing like one drive every two weeks on drives we’ve only had since early August. And if these drives failed, then what to do next?? Which brand to trust with our floundering budget?
-
G-tech Q’s are typically good drives. Personally I avoid LaCie for the same reasons as you apparently had. But all drives can fail – it could be too hot in your edit bay, or too dusty, or you got a bad batch.
How many do you have on a chain? Try splitting them up evenly. I might be wrong but I though 6 devices was MAXIMUM on firewire.
Also download an applescript to keep your drives from going to sleep while editing.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up