[Chris Kelly]

I’m actually working with them on another issue where one of the two systems we have periodically records at around 20fps. I was thinking maybe someone saw this problem in another application and could at least give me an idea how they fixed it.

[Chris Kelly]

Basically, I’m recording our newscasts to DV for our department to make Proof-of-Performance spots. The short of it is every time our master-control-op puts our control room on the on the air, it triggers the VirtualVTR to start recording. FCP is overkill for that purpose, even if it could work. VirtualVTR is the right app for this.

[Chris Kelly]

It’s just Quicktime DV, and it plays files recorded in the same way. It’s just about 1/10th of them give this error while one that was captured on either side of it work fine.

[Chris Kelly]

Yeah, it’s a Firewire 800 drive, the FantomDrive Triple Interface to be exact. I’m capturing from SDI/Analog Audio to DV on the Firewire drive. I’ve turned off all power-management, so the drive won’t go to sleep or anything, but it still has the problem. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. About 1/3 of the clips captured have this problem, but the other 2/3 are perfect. When I did the read/write test on the system tester… it showed a pretty sluggish start on the write part, and then it would get up to speed. Is there anyway to get that rate up a bit, or am I SOL? My backup plan is to record to the system drive and have a script or a folder action move any non-open file to the firewire, and have it run the operation every minute so it doesn’t fill up the drive.

[Chris Kelly]

I’m assuming this is a MacPro? Did you run the Expansion Slot Utility?
The Configuration Expansion Slot Utility is located on your Mac Pro at: /System/Library/CoreServices/

Run that and use the 2nd option on the list.

[Chris Kelly]

For some reason, the app didn’t load when we inserted the card after the power-up. I had to search for it. It’s at:

/System/Library/CoreServices/

Just run that little applet and take option 2. That’ll do the trick.

[Chris Kelly]

Make absolutely sure that the Expansion Slot Utility runs and that you choose the second option in the utility. If not, your LHe will not work properly and will cause you hours of pulling your hair out.

[Chris Kelly]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Quite frankly, I’m not sure how the workflow is going to work in the news-department… and that’s what’s killing me. How to organize all of the data from our photogs so that it’s viewable in P2 Viewer. As it is right now, they pull the data to the network server. But to organize things more efficiently, they put it into different folders. As an example, some stuff is brought in for a daily story and the raw content is deleted after 3 days. Some stuff, for the more in-depth special reports, is kept on the network for an undetermined amount of time. As far as I can tell from an earlier post… if I try to bury my card-data folders in a few layers of folders, the Viewer won’t work.

And since us producers are on Dell PCs, the logger won’t work (while it’s very cool)

All I’m looking for is a very simple edit program, so us producers can view the content… drop some clips to a timeline… and make a single DV file that I can send to my editor. Since P2 is such a professional format, I think my request is not likely to happen, but it’s worth a shot.

[Chris Kelly]

My recommendation would be Google Earth. They have a pay-for-play version that looks pretty good. They use it on all the major networks. But I’m not certain how $$$ it is.