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FCP 6 errors on drive read speed
I have been using a Rosewill RC-605 eSata ExpressCard 34 card for quite some time. I got a Seagate Free Agent Pro 500 GB external hard drive to edit and save my captured media on. My card is hooked eSata into the drive.
Many, many times when I am previewing my sequence in my record window, Final Cut will stop playing and display an error message saying that frames were dropped, and it gives possible reasons why this has occurred. Well, a couple of the reasons lead me to believe that something is preventing my External Drive to function as an eSata drive (fast and able to handle the HDV 1080i sequence I am working with). I am not sure whether my eSata card is going bad or the drive is having troubles. I have read where bad cards have causes drives to deteriorate. I hope this isn’t the case.
If my drive really is the issue, what is the best kind of external hard drive I can use on my MacBook Pro (early 2008), or is eSata the best (which is what I have been told, hence my purchase)? How can this be fixed, if it can be?
Also, I have captured in “HDV-ProRes 422”, and am editing in “Apple ProRes 422 1440×1080 60i”. Should I have captured with the AIC? I have heard that really compresses video. The only thing I can think of is that my drive can’t keep up with ProRess 422 – but shouldn’t eSata be able to??
Something is not running like it should…
Thanks
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4 Replies
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The only eSata solution on a laptop is an Express card, but they are limited to the speed of the express slot and so they function at a fraction of the speed of PCI SATA controller cards in desktop computers.
I know little about the Rosewill brand of express cards, and certainly have no idea if it’s working properly, but I would suspect that your problem most likely is related to the following:
a) Your SATA drive is filling up, thus slowing down and limiting throughput, as SATA drives typically do.
b) The fact that you’re only using a single SATA drive. Your best best is to get a two-drive enclosure so you can stripe two drives together to create a much faster Raid-0. That will give you more space and, more importantly, will nearly double your throughput.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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Hi Ryan,
HDV should be possible to be played almost with a USB drive without dropping frames.
The first thing you should do is to get yourself one of those little applications to mesure your HDs speed.
I think that you can get the one from AJA in their web site.
I’m working with eSATA drives in my MBP with a LaCie Xpress card and I get read/write speed on top of 80 MBps.
But I don’t think yours is a HD-speed problem, but system maintenance, As I said you shouldn’t have problem to play HDV in FW400. Use an application like DiskWarrior or TechTools to rebuild your HDs directories most of all your system drive.
Run it in the media drives as well. Normally after one week working the speed of the HDs goes down to 40/50 MBps. As soon as I run DiskWarrior the speed rise again to 80/90 MBps.
Cheers,
Rafael -
Thank you very much. DiskWarrior seemed to have found things wrong.
David, thanks for your input as well. I will look into a Raid setup in the future.
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Hi Ryan,
Don’t hesitate running few times DiskWarrior until you get the graphic fully clean.
The time you spend maintaining your Mac is not lost. You will recover it when editing and rendering.
Cheers,
rafael.
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