FCP 5 project taking forever to launch

[Ron James]

Yes, you can remount the drive and try taking just the render files offline first (add a space into the render files folder name) and/or try the same with individual media files, each time relaunching the project with another file or bunch of files offline until you’re able to narrow it down. I haven’t had to do this for a long time, but the method (adding a space into the beginning of the file’s name) should still be valid.

If the project launches fine when you take the render files offline, I’d just delete the whole bunch of them and re-render anything you need.

HTH

[Ron James]

[Mark Raudonis] “What he means is that firewire drives are notoriously unreliable and prone to crash just when you can least afford it… like now when you’re at the end of the project.

Firewire drives are NOT recommended for use with FCP by Apple (even though everyone uses them). Your experience is exactly why Apple says “don’t do it”.”

Not much choice, sometimes, if you’re working from a Powerbook eh?

[Jake Diamond]

Thanks, I’ll give it a try.

[Kevin Monahan]

A SATA Array attached via PCMCIA would be an alternative for you but I’d say that any major project with a TB of media would not be attempted with a meager PowerBook. It’s possible, but it’d drive me crazy….

Mark is correct, FireWire drives are pretty dicey – especially if you don’t maintain them frequently, religiously unmount them before shut-down, run DW often, Repair Permissions.

My guess is that Drive #3 is faulty (or was never set up properly in the first place) and needs some serious maintenace. The first thing I’d do is check out the directory structure of Drive #3. Has it been formatted with Mac OS Extended (HFS +)?

I’m not saying that this is your problem reel2reel….but you see these kinds of problems cropping up more and more lately.

My feeling is that the availability of cheaper drives has tempted doc makers (especially newer ones) to want to have WAY too much media online to work with. Footage rarely is logged or planned out prior to capturing it. Sure, you can log afterward – just make sure to blow away any media you surely will not need. If you “just buy more drives” than that is complicating your situation rather than helping it. I think that’s what Tom means by “Large projects with a lot of media need a lot of pre=planning to handle the media efficiently”.

By capturing tape roll after tape roll with no media management leads to having way too much media and way more overhead for FCP to handle. As you’ve found, each new chunk of media, will bog your system down as time goes forward and more drives are added to the system.

Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Workshop!
fcpworld.com

[Jake Diamond]

Hello to all who responded to my problem,

First, thank you all very much for your thoughts and advice. It turned out that one of the firewire drives (a Lacie 500 gig) is not functioning. The drive will not even copy media, and after trying every data rescue and disk repair program, we’ve decide to recapture the multitude of hours of footage.

When I started this project and saw I would be working with firewire drives, I was tentative, but forgot about that feeling until now. I will proceed much differently after the experence of this job. Again, thanks everyone for your help.

Jake