New G5 – Dropped Frames

[Don Greening]

You definitely need a second drive dedicated to media only. You can buy another SATA drive for the empty bay inside the G5. Find the biggest size available, something like 500Gbytes. You’ll need the space if this is the only drive you’re buying for a while. When you get it installed, immediately use Apple’s Disk Utility to initialize the disk in Mac OS Extended, journaling OFF.

FW drives are OK if you’re working with straight DV, but get something like a G Raid or LaCie Big Disk Extreme with a minimum of 500 Gbyte in capacity.

Using your startup drive to capture and edit media is generaly considered to be very unreliable. Your dropped frames problems will attest to that.

– Don

[David Roth weiss]

[Don Greening] “Using your startup drive to capture and edit media is generaly considered to be very unreliable.”

Worse than that, it simply doesn’t work.

[Tim Vaughan]

I agree with Don, no question. However, I would caution you on the Lacie 500GB drives, This forum has hundreds of posts on the 500’s, and I personally have experienced trouble with them. Lacie is a great company, and they did do their best to fix the problem, but all data on the drive was lost. I HIGHLY recommend the Lacie 250GB drives instead of the 500’s. We haven’t had any trouble with them, and it is rare that they show up in posts for trouble. But you may need to get a couple, and daisy chain them together. (And purchase a surge protector with a lot of outles…..)
Regardless of what you do, always backup, backup!

Tim

Tim

[David Bogie]

Bogi. 01:01: RTFM.

The minimum drive requirements and platter configuration are clearly explained in The Good Book that came with your copy of FCP.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Arnie Schlissel]

[bogiesan] “Bogi. 01:01: RTFM. “

Let me give a loud Amen!

Somewhere in the 1st or 2nd volume of the FCP5 manual is a whole chapter on how to set up your system. I know this because when I upgraded to FCP5 (after 3 1/2 years of working with FCP on a daily basis) I made sure to read the whole manual. All 4 volumes of it. It’s amazing what you can learn when you read the manual!

Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Arniepix] “All 4 volumes of it”

That, my friend, must have been a dry read.

———–
G5 Dual 2Ghz <> 4GB RAM <> FCP 5.03 <> Kona 2
ATTO 42XS <> Huge Systems 4105 Fibre
OS 10.4.2 <> QT 7.0.3

[Mediacentral]

Is having Journaling off important? If so, it may be the problem I am having. I have a dual 2.0Ghz with 4Gb ram and an internal SATA 250Gb HD but have still been experiencing dropped frames, even after going through all of the troubleshooting hints on this forum and on Apple’s support pages (turning timeline waveforms, overlays off; safe vs. unlimited RT; rendering as whole clips and re-importing, etc.

I’ve been at wit’s end and would love for this to be the issue.

Thanks, as always, for any help.

Scott Becka, Media Central Tampa
Dual 2.0 Ghz G5 – FCP5 – DSP4

[Don Greening]

To oversimplify the explanation, journaling keeps a running tab on everything that gets written to and deleted from a hard disk. Journaling turned on for a media drive will interfere with the capture process and cause various problems, including dropped frames during capture. Journaling should only be used with the startup disk. Some users even want to disable the new ‘Spotlight’ feature in OS X Tiger because they feel that program interferes with FCP as well. I personally have not run into the “Spotlight” issue yet, probably because my media/transfer rate needs are minimal, in that I work with MiniDV only.

– Don

[Jordan Woods]

make sure you are completely updated on that dual 2- I have experienced numerous problems with other people’s dual 2 and not having upgraded their boot rom version (firmware 5.1.8f …ish)

upgrading the firmware is more than downloading, there is an slightly involved install attached to it. most download with the auto updater and forget to do the whole install action.