[Craig Thomas quinlan]

You should never sleep a computer used for any serious editing. ALWAYS disable sleep on edit systems; every system out there configured by a professional will always have this function disabled for a reason. In fact, this is something specifically delineated in most admin guides for all the major SAN solutions out there, as well as most PCI card manufacturers.

You can use the screensaver or shut down, but sleep causes issues with external storage, san volumes, pci cards, etc, all day long.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

Since you need to pull files larger than 2GB, the best (and easiest) option here is to use a Mac formatted volume, and buy a cheap program called MacDrive for 49 bucks (https://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/). This lets you mount Mac formatted external drives on a PC without those file size limitations. Then you already have a mac formatted volume with your pc data on it without needing to reformat anything.

You can definitely connect and transfer via ethernet, but it’s a little more complicated. You could probably do a quick google search that’d tell you what you need to do.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

If you’ve been using this OS drive for awhile, it may have become too fragmented for proper operation. You took the right steps with permissions repair and diskwarrior, but over time the OS becomes very unreliable due to fragmentation and general corruption. If you can, get a new SATA drive, and if you keep a good cloned image, create a fresh OS drive and reinstall FCP. This is what everyone does eventually to get rid of problems just like this.

Once you do, use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a disk image of your new drive, so that if you ever need a fresh OS again, you can just clone a new sata drive with all of your programs already installed, saving yourself hours or even days of time.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

The FC pref pane is built into OSX – the drivers for the Apple FC card are already installed before you put the card in, they only show up once it’s in. As soon as the card is out, the pref pane will disappear. Other than that, you’re set.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

None so far, but we’re still testing. We’ll probably wait a few weeks to upgrade everyone to see if the public community finds any issues.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

1.Shut down the computer.
2.Unplug all cables except for power, and touch the metal pci access covers on the back to discharge any static electricity.
3.Unplug the power cable.
4.Pull the side panel latch on the back up, remove the panel, lay the mac pro on its side.
5.You’ll see your two cards immediately. Loosen the two screws on the pci bracket and remove the bracket.
6.With your two cards you shouldn’t need to worry about the locking clip on the board, but if you need it, release it.
7.Pull the cards out, put them in an antistatic bag.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

The audio mixer tool (Option+6) lets you view all of your audio tracks at once.

If you mean changing levels on different audio clips simultaneously, highlight the audio clips you want to adjust, and press Ctrl and +/- . Each time you press + or – with ctrl, the audio levels move up or down 1db for all selected audio clips.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

Since you have digibeta material and you’re finishing to digibeta, you’ll probably want to match your sequence settings to that. That way, you’re working in the format you’ll finish on. Ctrl+q for easy setups, or Command+0 for sequence settings, match to SD PAL. You won’t need to render any of the PAL digibeta footage this way, and you don’t need to change anything for your output.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

You do this during the install process – when you get to the screen to choose which FCP applications to install, you can route the content to other locations from the pulldown menu next to each content listing.

[Craig Thomas quinlan]

You have 5gb of ram. Lose a stick. Keep in multiples of four. An odd number like 5GB causes issues with playback.