David Roth weiss
Forum Replies Created
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Your best bet in this case would be to transcode all files to a single “mezzanine codec,” and I would recommend Pro Res 422. It’s a high-performance codec, meaning faster renders. If you were mixing material before, especially if you were editing h.264 or mpeg4, those are not really file types supported in FCP 7, even though they seem to work, albeit extremely slowly and often with many other issues.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Try uninstalling the nvidia drivers and reinstalling the latest version available for that ancient care if there is one.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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Danny,
It’s pretty clear from your post that some aspect of your workflow was incorrect. I’d imagine that your inexperience with FCP most likely caused you to start the project incorrectly, which is the most common issue when starting out with the application.
In order to help you more info is required. The most basic info necessary to help you with any precision is:
1) What media type (codec) are you editing? If you don’t know, what type of camera was used, and did you transcode that prior to editing, or are you editing native files?
2) What are your sequence settings? (Posting a screen grab would help)
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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I suspect the reality is that until Thunderbolt 3 lands there’s not really any benefit to 12G hardware, as even the current crop of 6G 8-bay Thunderbolt RAIDs tend to saturate the capabilities of Thunderbolt well before delivering the theoretical throughput of eight drives stripped together.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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[Walter Soyka] “But my question is this: isn’t there an entire class of problems a VAR can’t solve?”
Walter, you seem to be missing one VERY important point, VARs have to support what they sell, and that can be terribly expensive if the VAR is not on top of every detail. So, no good VAR sells untested configurations, because they would be shooting themselves in the foot, because customer support ties up personnel, cash, and resources.
Unlike DIYers and even manufacturers, VARs who specialize in media & entertainment have vetted their turnkey systems and ALL software and hardware before it’s delivered, because they simply can’t afford to support untested solutions and the enormous risk and cost of possibly having them returned.
[Walter Soyka] “Do you really feel that more users are stopped by conflicts between their hardware and their software, or by pure software bugs that can only be solved by the developer?”
Software bugs are always going to happen, and of course those can ONLY be fixed by the developer. No one, VAR or DIYer, can fix bugs, so I’m not sure what that’s really part of the discussion.
However, just as there are some people here who nearly always seem to know what to get and what to avoid, VARs stick with known working OSs, software versions, and hardware, and are very conservative about switching, for the reasons I mentioned above… i.e. – they can’t afford to sell experimental configs unless a customer demands it, and then a good VAR will have the customer waive the responsibility for the untested components.
FYI, there are many companies out there selling all kinds of overclocked systems for gaming and even VFX, but those systems tend to fail in professional editing environments, because they can’t standup to the intensive pressures of full-time post-production. These types companies are NOT the types VARs I’m referring to, and they are not those who tend to advertise here on the Cow either.
Though I hate to mention names, Alienware (now a Dell owned company) is the classic example of the kind of company I am referring to. Companies like this sell a lot of hype, while editors need rock solid performance, reliability, and knowledgable video-centric support.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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[Walter Soyka] “n my experience, most issues people have are either educational issues or purely software issues (bugs/bad documentation), not “integration of software and peripherals.” These kinds of issues should be solved by the developer’s support team (ha).”
Walter,
But, which “developer’s support team” are you referring to?
Users who have as you put it, “educational issues,” typically don’t have a clue what is at the root of their issues – due to their lack of knowledge they tend get bounced back and forth between developers. You have software developers pointing at the hard are developers, and vice versa. This is precisely the shortcoming of DIY troubleshooting and DIY support, and we see that here on the Cow all day, everyday.
As I’ve said before, if you have more time than money, do it all yourself – you’ll lose creative time, but you will save money.
On the other hand, if efficiency and creativity are your goals, get to work and leave he integration and troubleshooting to the pros.
[Walter Soyka] “Let’s understand what VARs do a little better. What kinds of problems can you call your VAR with and get immediate help? What kinds of problems will they be unable to assist with?”
Any VAR worth his/her weight in salt, who sells a turnkey solution, should be able to fix just about an issue remotely, other than a hardware board or card failure, which of course requires replacement of the bad hardware. They simply remote in to a workstation or server to troubleshoot from anywhere over the Internet, and because they assembled all the components and software, they are much better at troubleshooting systems than end users or the developers who supply individual components of a system.
Do you understand this now?
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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[Walter Soyka] “n my experience, most issues people have are either educational issues or purely software issues (bugs/bad documentation), not “integration of software and peripherals.” These kinds of issues should be solved by the developer’s support team (ha).”
Walter,
But, which “developer’s support team” are you referring to?
Users who have as you put it, “educational issues,” typically don’t have a clue what is at the root of their issues – due to their lack of knowledge they tend get bounced back and forth between developers. You have software developers pointing at the hard are developers, and vice versa. This is precisely the shortcoming of DIY troubleshooting and DIY support, and we see that here on the Cow all day, everyday.
As I’ve said before, if you have more time than money, do it all yourself – you’ll lose creative time, but you will save money.
On the other hand, if efficiency and creativity are your goals, get to work and leave he integration and troubleshooting to the pros.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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If you were on a Mac there’s an app I’d recommend, but alas you’re not. Not that I prefer Macs BTW, just that there are many more really good free apps on that side.
Another thing to consider is your internal power supply… If it’s no longer supplying the necessary juice to all your internal components you’ll get many strange errors on your workstation that can present themselves in a number of different ways, such as disk errors.
The power supply in your drive dock may also be faulty… hence the issue with the eSATA port possibly.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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[Oliver Peters] “Quite true, but definitely an issue with Apple. Let’s say you have an older machine and you’ve steadily updated it. You have a problem and take it to the Genius Bar. They determine it needs to be wiped and a clean OS installed due to OS corruption. In that case, they will only bring the machine back up to what was “current” for that machine. If the machine is old enough to be considered “vintage”, then they will not install the current OS. That’s up to you.”
Absolutely true Oliver… This is why I lump all three major manufacturers together in this discussion – not one of them really knows the needs of video editors when troubles exceed the most basic of common hardware issues.
For example, anyone who goes to visit a so-called Apple Genius when issues arise with a FCP system knows well, not only do the geniuses NOT know how to troubleshoot FCP and FCPX, they are forbidden to do so by Apple management, who put the fear of God into their employees about what they can and cannot deal with.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.
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I may be wrong, but I’d bet you anything that you’re overfilling your hard drives.
How much free space (by percentage please) do you have on the offending hard drives?
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss ProductionsDavid is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.