external hard drive to work w/ Producer?

[Kieran Matthew]

Hi GSW,

[GSW video] “Feedback I got from my last cow posting said I shouldn’t be digitizing any media to my Macs internal drives even though they are different from my boot drive. They said they didn’t think the internal, serial ATA drives were fast enough.”

Really? I’ve Raided 3 of the 4 bays in my MacPro and use this exclusively for video. I’ve had no opportunity to give compressed HD a real-world test, but the numbers stack up and it was handling 10 bit uncompressed quite happily. You won’t get much luck digitising to the internal drive of the laptop, so you will still need a external there.

I would recommend the G-RAID FW800 500Gb. I was usuing this as a mobile RAID for several suites working in SD on 8.2.3. Some real time issues occasionally but overall, it worked well.

BUT. I don’t think the issue you are seeing is drive speed based. Media 100 will give you a specific error if it can’t stream the data of the discs quick enough. What you are seeing seems much more like a bug, probably to do with the drop-frame issue you mentioned.

K

[Bob Slenker]

Thanks for the tip in the hard drive Kieran. I have had the MacBook Pro for a few months and that’s the machine I first started having this problem on so when I recently acquired a MacPro, I wanted to see if it did the same thing. It does. ??? I hope it’s a bug. That means I’m doing the right things and it’s something that can be addressed. ???

[Bob Slenker]

also wondering if hooking camera up to the firewire 800 port instead of the 400 port would cure this or if 16 bit vs. 12 bit audio would have anything to do w/ it. ???

[Chris Clephane]

Just a few thoughts…..

1. Sync issues. Look up LOCKED vs. UNLOCKED audio in reference to DV recording (see following link).
This may be where your problem is.

QUICK ARTICLE ANSWER: If you are transferring unlocked DV audio over firewire and processing the audio clips independently of the video…there may be the potential for some drift issues on long sequences/clips.

https://www.dvformat.com/htm/features/2000/8_00/dv_format_faq.htm

Based on that (and having experienced similar problems in the past) I would be SHOCKED to discover your hard drives (in ANY configuration) were causing sync issues. Ususally ANY type of driv e problem triggers messages from the Media100 application. Media100 has ALWAYS been good about self-reporting drive speed issues and the like. (APPLICATION ERROR: source drive too slow, etc.)

One way TEST your setup (in relation to the aforementioned article). Redigitize your footage ANALOG. (Use the composite with analog audio.) I bet good money that your “drift” problem goes away when you work with THAT footage.
***Ok I just re-read your configuration and I see you have no M100 hardware on your macpro. TEST it by digitizing the footage analog into your Vincent 8.2 system and bring it into the producer SW. I would venture to guess that the sync problem goes away. At this point you would need to adjust the record settings in your camera (switching to a locked audio format) and your firewire transferred footage into Producer should then be fine as well.

2. We use Maxtor (1TB) external FW drives with M100Producer on our laptop. The Maxtor unit has 2 500gb drives in it that can be striped RAID 0. This provides a pretty consistent 60MB/second which is just fine for most laptop work. It is significantly faster than the single drive firewire drives..most of which deliver a consistent 25-35MB/second.
We use a firewire converter on the FW400 port for monitoring to an external tube (tv/monitor) and put the Maxtor drive on the FW800 port. Its a great setup on the road.

Good luck.

PS. (SHAMELESS SALES WARNING!) FYI-We have several Media100 8.2 P6000 lossless (and non-lossless) with DV cardsets with SDI and BOB’s that we could sell you for (not much) if you want to upgrade the Vincent system…..

I edit video. I post sometimes.
I fix things. I eat marshmallows.
I play drums. I drink scotch.
I like TV.

Done typing now.

[Andrew Mehta]

PS. (SHAMELESS SALES WARNING!) FYI-We have several Media100 8.2 P6000 lossless (and non-lossless) with DV cardsets with SDI and BOB’s that we could sell you for (not much) if you want to upgrade the Vincent system…..

>>Might be interested in some of that myself.
andrew at united games dot co dot uk.
Ta.

[Robert Slenker]

An update: I’ve still never solved my problem of digitizing long clips (over 20 min) and not getting the audio and video out of sync towards the end. I bought a G-Raid FW 800 500GB external drive to digitize media to and the problem still happens…every time. The footage comes from MiniDV tapes recorded using a Canon XL-1 camcorder. Camcorder hooks up via the FW800 port on the front of the Mac. One person mentioned locked vs. unlocked audio but I see no settings in the camera’s menu to determine this. I’m set to 29.97 DF SD mode. It’s very frustrating when I’ve got a smoking Mac Pro (Intel) desktop w/ Media 100 Producer 11.6 and I can’t use it for my work. At our university, we record primarily event videography (plays, concerts, seminars, etc) to run on our TV channel. I still have to rely on my Mac G4 Media100 8.2 system. It’s never failed me. If this is a bug it may not have been seen because I assume everyone generally produces programs w/ short clips assembled together…not a 55 min lecture shot w/ one camera….sort of CSPAN style.