[Dave Gage]

[Gary Huff] “What year are your MacBook Pros?”

1. I have an early 2011 17″ i7 that did ship with Snow Leopard.

2. My wife has my older 2009 MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.53 15″. I believe this originally shipped with Leopard.

[Gary Huff] “Did they originally come installed with Lion? (Late 2011 and onwards).”
I am actually considering picking up another 17″ Quad-Core i7 if I can swing it and they are still available as a refurb in the Apple Store later this year. The 17″ size is easier for me to see than the 15″ models and I really like the upgradeability and portability of it. With 16GB RAM and 2 internal drives, it’s plenty fast for what I do. I’m disappointed the 15″ retina displays are not upgradeable except for the hard drive or I would consider one of them for the next MBP upgrade.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Jeremy Garchow] “but they will, however, boot older OSes from external disks.”

Are you sure about that? My two Macbook Pros are still on 10.6.8 (and can that way) and will be there as long as I can get away with it. That would be great if it is true in case we pick up a newer MBP and need to run Snow Leopard for CS4 or something similar.

I know this doesn’t apply to the newer OS’s and a PPC. If it did, it would make life much easier for me until I’ve got the dough to upgrade my boys Dual G5 to an Intel machine. That Dual G5 is still a good machine for some things (Logic Pro), but I can’t go past 10.5.8 with it, and my oldest son (10) is getting into programming, Motion 5, and 3D graphics, but can’t do much of it in Leopard. Until we can afford a computer upgrade, I put Mountain Lion on an external drive in a Voyager Drive Dock and when my wife or I are not using our MB Pros, he can get in and play around with these programs that don’t run in Leopard. Not ideal, but works.

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Nikolas Bäurle] “Highlight both files you need, ctrl+click, synchronize clips. X creates a new file with the master sound and the camera sound from the video, then you can turn on the tracks you need in the inspector or expand your audio components in the timeline. In this case I would leave the audio connected.”

Multicam would be the best solution of course for multiple audio and video sources, but are there specific examples of when you might want to sync more than one audio track to a single video file? I can’t think of any off the top of my head and if there are some good instances, how well does it work? Is the audio sync basically best for a one video / one extra audio circumstance (maybe a finished music video edit and then add in the pristine studio track) and everything else go to multicam?

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Stephen Hill] “Seems I have pretty much the same model MBP as you so perhaps I can go up to 16GB.”

For the last 5-10 years, I’ve been buying my RAM from OWC. Check to see if your model is on this list-
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/Apple_MacBook_MacBook_Pro/Upgrade/DDR3_1333MHz_SDRAM

My model is the MacBookPro8,3. When I bought it the price was a bit better than now, but $160 for 16GB is still not too bad.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Stephen Hill] “Did you replace your OS drive with an SSD and then move your original HDD to an optibay?”

Stephen,

I posted this elsewhere a while back, but here’s the original post (with some benchmarks)-
https://www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/15934-experiences-benchmarks-using-hybrid-2-5-hdd-externally-and-internally

Here’s a quote from it:
“I move around a lot and being able to edit anywhere at any time on my 2011 MBP i7 17” is a huge advantage for me. Because of this I decided to look at the option of removing my Optical Drive and putting in an OWC Data Doubler so that I have a 2nd drive for media always with me (and then I don’t have to drag around an external RAID). SSDs are still too pricey for the amount of GBs you get, so I bought the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid 750GB HDD. I first tested it with FCP X in an external drive dock connected via a 3GB eSata ExpressCard. The editing experience with FCP X felt fine. In fact, it didn’t feel much different than with my 2-drive RAID 1 setup.”

I ended up taking out the Optical Drive and putting my original Apple boot drive (750GB 5400 Drive) in it’s place. I then put the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid 750GB HDD in the hard drive slot which is now my edit drive.

To get the full 6GBs connection speeds internally, you will need to make sure you’ve made this firmware upgrade-
https://blog.macsales.com/11895-2011-macbook-pro-sata-problems-resolved
—

Some Benchmarks:

Seagate Hybrid 750GB internal slot- 6GB connection (Quick Bench “Large file Test”):
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms): Write-270 MB/s, Read- 134 MB/s.]

Internal 5400 Drive original main drive slot: Write- 57 MB/s, Read- 57 MB/s

Internal 5400 Drive (optical drive slot 12/23/12 after firmware upgrade):
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms): Write-90 MB/s, Read- 90 MB/s.]

…I then checked out the difference between the changing my external RAID from a “1” to a “0”:

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 1 3/4 full (Quick Bench “Large file Test” from SpeedTools Utilities 12-24-12)
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 97 MB/s, Read- 99 MB/s.].

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 1 EMPTY (Quick Bench “Large file Test” from SpeedTools Utilities 12-27-12):
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 96 MB/s, Read- 155 MB/s.]

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 0 EMPTY (Quick Bench “Large file Test” from SpeedTools Utilities 12-27-12):
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 96 MB/s, Read- 155 MB/s.]

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 0 1/4 FULL (Quick Bench “Large file Test” from SpeedTools Utilities 12-27-12):
[With the “Allow Cache Effects” checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 97 MB/s, Read- 156 MB/s]
—

One last hardware note, I am maxed out at 16GB of RAM, but when I went from 8 to 16GB, I didn’t notice much difference. On the other hand, my job workflow doesn’t really push the limits of the software or the hardware.

I’ve got to run, but let me know if you have any other questions. By the way, I’m broke now and frankly satisfied with the way system my runs, but at some time in the future, I will swap out both the boot drive and the edit drive to SSD. That should be fun and give this 2011 MBP a new lease on life.

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Andy Neil] “David, question about your eSATA problems. What are your issues exactly?”

Andy,

As I just said in another reply, I will likely move on from eSata because I’ve spent so much time with it with little success and I now edit directly on an internal drive I added as a replacement for the optical drive. It works great and my only use for eSata now is to speed up backups, but it’s pretty much a non-issue at this point.

My experience has been that despite what Apple and vendors like OWC say, eSata via the ExpressCard slot is not “hot-swappable”. I learned this from experience and then spoke with a senior engineer with the Disk Warrior people and he said they treat it like SCSI. I’ve found that when it’s working for me, I must re-boot after using the eSata card or sometime within 24 hours the computer will crash randomly.

But, as I said, for me, this is all moot. I’m using FW800 for backup and a new Seagate 7200rpm Hybrid drive for editing that I added when I removed the optical drive. The internal drive is just as fast as my 2-drive RAID 0 enclosure when connected via eSata and the ExpressCard slot in “feel” and through benchmarks.
—

After 25 years of never losing one single bit of data, I had a Carbon Copy Cloner accident (completely my fault), and wrote over about 8 years of video files, mostly family video. Being way to clever for my own good, I immediately backed up the changes to it’s backup drive. Fortunately, I bought “Data Rescue 3” from Amazon a few days later and it appears I recovered all the files back. After “Disk Warrior”, DR3 is now my second favorite piece of software.

I’ve mostly just been using FW800 for external backups and it’s been fine. But, to run the recovery software on the 2 TB RAID via FW800 would have taken 25 hours. When I connected the RAID via the eSata it said 10 hours which I could live with, but of course the eSata was not rock solid which made me think after this incident I would try to move over to the ThunderBolt port and a TB or USB 3 drive dock. Well, that’s not really going to work either, so I’ll just stick with FW800 until I truly need more external connection speed.

If I do need to go back to eSata, I will take yours and Jeremy’s advice and try the Sonnet Pro card and proprietary drivers.

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Stephen Hill] “eSATA via the express card slot on my 17″ MBP has always been very iffy.”

Yep, where I’ve been since day 1 with eSata via the ExpressCard Slot. I will likely move on from eSata because I’ve spent so much time with it with little success and I now edit directly on an internal drive I added as a replacement for the optical drive. It works great and my only use for eSata now is to speed up backups, but it’s pretty much a non-issue at this point. But, I would like to know your experience with the Sonnet driver.

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Andy Neil] “Disk Warrior fixed about 30-50 things on my system disk and when I looked at the details, I noticed that virtually ALL of the corruption was centered around the video codecs. Once it repaired those issues, FCPX worked fine.”

Andy,

(I may not have time today, but I will respond to your post about the eSata issues too from the other thread.)

A year later, after numerous problems fixed by Disk Warrior (DW) on 3 different computers, I now believe that Disk Warrior should be included with every Mac and used like Disk Utility and permission repair. In a post here and also offline, I ranted, mostly with Jeremy G about how I believed that FCP X “hosed” my OWC external capture/media RAID drive twice in about 8 months. This drive was only used for FCP X video and I never had any issues when it was the FCP7 drive.

I won’t go into all the details, but the drive became unusable and I spoke with Apple and OWC who had no solutions except to wipe the RAID clean and start over. That worked for a while, but what a pain and then the problem popped up again. I took the suggestion from someone to give DW a try. It took the RAID which again had become unusable, and fixed it. I then ran DW on all my computers and drives and it not only made my wife’s MBP boot up in half the time, but I completely resurrected an old Dual G5 which I had given up on after countless hours of swapping RAM, resetting PRAM, etc., because it “appeared” to be a hardware problem (it was one of the liquid-cooled one which had blown up once under warranty, but fixed by Apple.) No problems with that computer now. My sons use it primarily for Logic 9. I also now run DW on all my drives once every month or two.

I’ve been lucky. I’ve had very few problems with FCP X, aside from the directory corruption, and the eSata mess. In the last 25 years, I’ve been the victim too many times of upgrades which broke more things than they fixed, so I remain happily on OS 10.6.8 and FCP X 10.0.4 because everything works to my satisfaction. I have OS 10.8.3 with FCPX 10.0.8 on a partition, but absolutely no reason to use it.

Anyway, in terms of 3rd party utility software, Disk Warrior is about as good as it gets (Data Rescue 3 just saved by butt from an accidental Carbon Copy Cloner incident, but that’s another story). By the way, the phone support for Disk Warrior is excellent. When I had problems, I got escalated to a senior engineer who was extremely helpful and informative and told me things about eSata which helped and made a lot of sense (I’ll expand on this in the other thread later).

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Andrew Richards] ”
They’d need to cram a full USB 3 controller into the end of it.”

…so, you’re saying it would be possible or that there’s too much USB Controller stuff to make it work.

Dave

[Dave Gage]

[Tony Brittan] “Aside from buying clipwrap, which has its own troubles”

I’ve not ever run into any problems with ClipWrap. Just curious, what problems have you had with it?

Dave