Shooting and Importing very long clips, Spanned/Incomplete

[Jeremy Garchow]

What kind of scratch drive do you have and how is it formatted?

How many cards did you shoot on? What format?

[Scott Allman]

Jeremy,
I am using a Weibetech ToughTech XE FW800 1000GB.
I shot on one 32GB card and one 16GB card
I am shooting DVCpro HD 24PN

The drive works fine with other projects

Here’s the deal. When I look at one of the folders, from the Problem project, in the log and transfer window it shows three clips.
The first is 2 seconds long, the second is 47:55 long (spanned) and the third is 24:56 (Spanned).
When I look at the same folder on the scratch drive it shows 8 clips, 5 of them are 3.98 GB. If I drag one of the 3.98 GB MXF clips to the timeline (Thanks to Calibrated) it is only 29 seconds and 22 frames long. I can drag on the entire 47:55 clip in the log and Transfer window and see the whole thing.

I opened a folder from an entirely different project and dragged one of it’s clips into the same timeline.
The clips was just under 1GB and that clip was almost 3 minutes long.

Any ideas?
My headache is returning.

Thanks in advance,

Scott

[Jeremy Garchow]

Is your Weibetech drive OSX formatted or Fat32 or other?

[Scott Allman]

It should be OSX. How can I verify that?

[Jeremy Garchow]

Open your disk utility in the APplications > Utilities folder.

Click on the drive name itself, then check out what it says under “Format” at the bottom of the window.

Jeremy

[Scott Allman]

Well, well,

It is Fat 32. OK, so now what.
Every other project on the drive has been fine.
Should I transfer everything to another drive and reformat?

Scott

[Jeremy Garchow]

Yep, that’s what I figured.

Fat32 has a finite file size amount (I think it’s 4 gigs) and your mac doesn’t write to that format, which is why you are seeing the problem. Since the file is over 4GB, it doesn’t know what to do with it. What you need to do is take all of the information off of that disk and reformat it to OSX Extended journaled, then recopy the footage back on. You should then be able to transfer files larger than 4Gigs.

Make sense?

[Scott Allman]

First, Jeremy, thanks for everything so far.

I will purchase another harddrive today and start transferring files ASAP.
I needed a back-up anyway. Hopefully that will help.

But here’s another question. When I shoot in the field I generally take a 250GB Weibetech to empty cards onto. Then copy those folders to the larger harddrive when I get home. I use an older G4 with the slot that the cards fit into to transfer. Such was the case with this particular shoot. And I checked the 250GB Weibetech and it is formatted OSX and the folders from the cards are identical to the folders on the larger FAT32 drive that is attached to my editing system.

Again, this is how I done every shoot for the last year and never had this problem, but I’ve never shot clips that were 40+ minutes long. Is there and issue with shooting long clips that I’m not aware of?

Thanks,

Scott

[Jeremy Garchow]

[scott allman] “Is there and issue with shooting long clips that I’m not aware of? “

No. You have been getting lucky as all of your clips up until this point have been under 4gigs would be my guess.

Format to OSX and your problems will go away.

Jeremy

[Scott Allman]

OK,
I ordered a new 2TB harddrive. And will start emptying the the Weibetech as soon as it arrives.

But the thing is, when I empitied the cards at the shoot, I emptied them to the 250GB drive first and the contents from card #2 should be 3 clips, clip #1- 2 seconds long, clip #2 – 40+ minutes long and clip #3 – 20+ minutes long.
When I look at the contents of card #2 on the 250GB drive it is actually showing 8 clips all less than 4GB. But this BEFORE they are copied to the FAT32 drive. But then when I view them in the log and transfer window they show up correctly as 3 clips.

This confuses me.