How do I get my Xpress Pro to use the 9-pin on my deck instead of Firewire???

[Bob Zelin]

If you have installed your Keyspan USA-28X drivers on your MAC, go to the Deck Config menu in settings, and select the Keyspan adaptor – either port 1 or 2. You will have fun poking around the Deck Config menu, with all of it’s choices.

Bob Zelin

[Roman Mykytyn]

Bob,

Thanks, I figured that out and it seems to work. Unfortunately, I’m still having crashing issues, so I guess it wasn’t entirely about the firewire deck control.

I know this is a needle in a haystack, but any ideas about why it locks up? Basically, it finds and grabs anywhere from one to ten clips in the batch, then “freezes,” meaning that the deck plays on, but the blinking red capture light stops blinking, the timecode counter in the capture window stops incrementing, and eventually, I get the spinning beach ball.

I know there are dozens of variables, but I don’t seem to have trouble capturing normally (without batching), so I feel like my drive is OK, the firewire connection is OK, the deck is OK. what am I missing?

Thanks in advance.

[Bob Zelin]

my wild guess is that you have a disk drive issue – please describe EXACTLY what drives – what host adaptor, what type of drives, how they are stripped, what resolution you are using. This will help me guess what might be going on.

bob Zelin

[Roman Mykytyn]

Bob,

Thanks for taking the time. OK, so to be perfectly honest, my media drive is not on a RAID, it’s just a standard, high-speed internal ATA IBM DeskStar. I know this sounds terribly naive, but I’ve been doing the non-linear thing for seven years and while, at the beginning, I was forced to use SCSI drives on an ATTO card, when ATA’s got fast, I switched to them (especially since DV is less demanding than high-rez analog) and started using them in the standard configuration. I realize that many people make RAIDs out of them and use special adaptors, but the basic thing has always worked for me.

However, I’m not so stubborn as to think that I have all the answers. So, if you think that it’s CRUCIAL to set it up that way (pairs of drives, striped, etc.), perhaps I should consider it. Still, I must insist that I’ve been doing it this way under some pretty demanding circumstances and haven’t had problems with dropped frames or buffer underruns or whatever. Either way, I’d like to hear what you have to say on the subject.

Thanks again.

Roman

AVID Xpress Pro 4.6.5, Mac Dual 1.25 G4, 1.25GB RAM, OSX 10.3.8, IBM DeskStar ATA

[Bob Zelin]

If you are doing anything other than DV25, I have NO IDEA of how you have been working all this time with a single ATA drive. It’s a miracle, and you should build a house of worship around your PC. Hail Roman !

Bob Zelin

[Roman Mykytyn]

Please,… Bob… you flatter me…

Seriously, though, I HAVE been getting away with it, although in the case of my XpressPro, I’ve only been doing DV25, so maybe AVID is more picky about this stuff.

However, DV25 is what I’m currently trying to do here, and it crashes. I seem to be able to digitize normally without problem, but as soon as I try to batch it, things fail.

Still, in your opinion, a hard drive issue is where you would start looking? I won’t continue to bother you with this, I just wanted to get your opinion on where to go next, remembering that, using this drive, I’ve captured, edited, and exported several projects, some as long as 10 minutes.

Thanks again, and let me know if you’d like me to come by and bless your system.

Roman

[Bob Zelin]

Roman –
I hate to say it, but your single ATA internal drive SHOULD WORK for DV25. If I was there, I would “force you” to reformat the internal media drive, and try it again – as the drive may have some corruption (or is too full). It should work, and I have built systems (against my advice) exactly this way.

bob zelin

[Paul Peltekian]

I doubt it is your Hard Drive. What I’d be more inclined to look into, would be the timecode of both what’s on the tape and what’s already been logged.

Sometimes what’s on the tape could be dropframe and what’s logged could be non-drop frame and this could cause sporadic problems. Or as you said, the deck continues to play on but the system hangs… Seems to me that maybe there are not timecode breaks where the logged timecode says there is. Is this the only tape you’ve tried batch capturing with?

Try this. Throw in a tape that you know has at least 10 minutes of continuous, uninterupted footage. NO TIMECODE BREAKS! And quickly log 20 or more clips. then try a batch capture. see what happens.

-Paul

[Roman Mykytyn]

Paul,

Thanks for the input. I was just about to totally agree with you, when I started my AVID and just scanned over some existing footage in the timeline – NO DECK IN PLAY HERE. Anyway, I was dragging the bar back and forth across a section, checking for correct sync and it froze! Just like that! and I ended up with a spinning beach ball, then a kernel panic. Everytime I re-started, it panicked again.

So, I think it just MAY have something to do with my drive(s) after all. Right now, I can’t afford it, but what I need to do is buy another drive like my current media drive, RAID them together with Apple’s built-in utility and keep all my media strictly there and nothing else but media on it. Right now, it’s kind of a mess and I can’t rule it out officially.

So, I think I’ll start there, then proceed to checking timecode/tape issues, as you suggest. But thanks for the input, it really does help!

Roman

[Tonydeansmith]

HI Bob,

I have the same problem as someone else you helped out. I want to capture using “firewire” while using an rs-422 controller through a keyspan adapter. But I can’t even get the catpure/digitze window to open. It is not highlited at all.

Here’s what you said previously: “If you have installed your Keyspan USA-28X drivers on your MAC, go to the Deck Config menu in settings, and select the Keyspan adaptor – either port 1 or 2. You will have fun poking around the Deck Config menu, with all of it’s choices.”

I have tried that, but to no avail. I am on a mac. I heard something about registering your dvbuffers or something. Any idea what this could be?

Thanks for you time,
Tony