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Firewire Data Loss Confusion
I was handed this project from a person who had never edited anything before; three firewire drives had a cacophany of redundant and sloppily captured footage. The three drives were too many to connect to my computer without a hub. I got an IOGear firewire hub, and plugged the three drives into it.
With my own external drive, I can turn it on at any time while the computer is running and it just appears on the desktop. The new drives are another story. The only way I can be sure that the drives will run properly is to turn them on while they’re disconnected from the hub, then plug them in and watch them appear on the desktop one by one. The 3rd drive was giving me more noticeable trouble than the other two – so much trouble that, in fact, I took the data from the third drive and transferred it to the other two. Inefficient capturing procedures anyone?
If that complete crap wasn’t enough, this morning I try the method I’ve been using to mount the now two drives, and it doesn’t work. OSX tells me that the drives are unreadable. Trying to eject the drives doesn’t work, and after a few minutes of waiting for an unresponsive Finder I was forced to manually shut down the machine. Then came the data loss.
I turned the machine back on and loaded the drives via the method I used before. I started up the project file and it told me that I lost 11 media files. Two folders worth of data were lost. Something was weird about the data loss, too. I’ve seen PC data loss, and it has always been ugly: a whole bunch of partial files and folders that don’t work at all. This data loss was very clean: only the contents of two folders were lost. More weirdness: when I ran the playhead over some of the supposedly “lost” files, the correct video from those missing files appeared.
I recaptured the footage I needed and when I was finished with the cut I exported a full-res self-contained movie. For the time being, everything’s OK. My director is prepared for me to rebuild the project file and recapture everything.
After reading this, can any of you advise me as to steps to take in the future with this kind of thing? Did I make any aggregious mistakes that worsened everything? Anything at all would be most appreciated.Thanks,
Rich Snyder -
7 Replies
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Why didn’t you just Daisy-Chain the drives together?
Why did you use a Hub? -
The biggest piece of advice I could give here is don’t use firewire drives for the recapture.
The problem your have faced is one of the reasons Apple doesn’t approve of the use of FW drives for media storage. They are not reliable enough.
If you use a tower, put in an extra SATA drive inside. They go up to 500 GB now. Otherwise, add a SATA card and external SATA storage. To RAID or not to RAID depends on whether you’re using uncompressed SD or HD. For DV and HDV, RAIDing drives is overkill.
I don’t envy you the task, but at least you get the chance to start over, for what it’s worth! Much of the time when things like this happen, the editor just has to limp along and doesn’t get the chance to really get it right!
debe
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The Firewire drives should work just fine for you. Drop the hub and just daisey-chain them like mentioned above. Otherwise a fairly cheap ($50) PCI Firewire card would do the trick. Much cheaper than buying all new drives. Approved or not by Apple, Firewire drives do actually work pretty well. Don’t tell anyone, but I have eight FW drives and an AJA Io on this machine with a pair of FW 800 PCI cards and they have worked flawlessly for almost three years. However, the new system we are installing right now will have a Huge systems raid on it. I wouldn’t worry too much about the Firewire drives. Just loose the hub.
Tom -
I’ve been known to use firewire drives on the road, too. I’ve never had a problem, either. (knock on wood)
However, with a project this big, with this much media, and with what the poor guy has already gone through, it seems to me to make more sense to avoid the possibility of the same thing happening again. He’s already been through it once.
Yes, it will cost a little bit more, but the piece of mind will be well worth it, in my humble opinion.
debe
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Hi Tom,
At work, I have a G5 that won’t recognize my camcorder used as a deck if my external firewire 800 drive is plugged in, mounted or not. Could I daisy chain the camcorder to the external drive? I’m asking rather than trying it because I’d have to purchase a firewire cable that has a camera plug and an 800 plug. Does one of these exist? The way I work now is to capture to the system drive, then copy to the external drive, then trash the project on the system drive. An extra step I could live without. A second internal drive is on order but even then I need to move the projects to other computers–thus the external drive.
Thanks
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Your current methodology is pretty robust.
If you try to capture from your camcorder to a FW drive on the same bus (current/recent Macs only have one FW bus) or same “chain,” you’ll likely have problems. If you want to capture directly to an external FW8000 drive, I would suggest you add a PCI or PC card to your Mac (depending on whether it’s a Power Mac or a PowerBook/MacBook) to separate the capture device from the hard drive(s). This way the input from your camcorder is on a separate bus from the FW drive.
Yes, FW800 (9 pin) to “mini FW” (4 pin) cables exist. Check out cablestogo.com as one source of cables. However, your FW800 drive won’t work at full speed with that type of connection. Plus, if you connect your FW800 drive to your camcorder and Mac, altogether/daisy-chained, the data coming from the camcorder will travel upstream to the computer and then downstream to the FW drive, plenty of opportunity for capture problems (also depends on the camcorder brand/model). If you must use the same bus for both devices, it is a little better to use separate ports, rather than daisy-chaining your “computer->FW drive->camcorder.”
-Dave
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Thanks Dave,
Very clear. On my Mac at home I have a separate 3 port 800 card for the external drive and all works fine. My only concern now on the school computer is whether capturing constantly to the system drive, even though I don’t edit on it, will fragment the drive.
I also thought that the 800 port at the back would be on a different bus than the 400 port on the front of the G5. I guess not.
Craig
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