[David Telling]

Regarding “native” I was referring to the 720 24PN recording on the HVX200.

I wasn’t sure if the Easy set-up for 720 24 in Final Cut would actually take advantage of the DVC Pro HD hardware acceleration on my Kona 2 card – I thought I might have to set things up with an AJA codec to do this. I have since spoken to AJA technical support and they said that their acceleration is based on Apple’s DVC Pro HD codec. So it will indeed do it from the default Easy set-up settings in Final Cut.

Thanks for your help.

[David Telling]

You are right Bob, I did initially think this could be an AJA/Tempo SATA compatibility issue but it’s clearly gone beyond that. I thank the forum leaders for not objecting to this thread, but I will now close it.

Thanks everyone….signing off!

[David Telling]

This probably won’t help you, but check your serial number. I found out yesterday there might be some power supply issues for some G5’s – look at Apple’s site: https://www.apple.com/support/powermac/powersupply/repairextension/

“The affected Power Mac G5 models were sold between approximately October 2005 and August 2006 and feature Dual 2GHz, Dual 2.3GHz or Quad 2.5GHz PowerPC G5 processors.”

Serial Number Ranges

CK539xxxxxx – CK608xxxxxx
G8539xxxxxx – G8608xxxxxx
YM539xxxxxx – YM608xxxxxx
RM539xxxxxx – RM608xxxxxx

The Apple employee I spoke to about this said the majority of the time the computer just doesn’t start up at all, but some have had erratic behavior, and not all computers in this range will have problems.

Hope you’re able to sort it out. Good luck.

[David Telling]

Please could I get some help deciphering this email and it’s practical application to what I have been experiencing…

This is the email the Engineer at Sonnet (who looked over my System Logs sent) to their tech support phone people (who couldn’t really tell me what it meant).

“Ouch. The most obvious thing is the high number of errors on channel 0 – I don’t see any errors on Channel 2 at all (which is where he apparently has his second enclosure). He’s probably not going to like it, but can we detach the fusion 500 from port 0 – I don’t know why it would be problematic, but it just seems odd that all the errors are happening on that line – and a lot of errors it is. Almost every time the machines restarts, there are significant numbers of errors on channel 0.”

For clarification:
When he speaks of “errors” – where are these coming from?
Does this consequently translate to corrupt files being saved/stored on the drives?
Would these “errors” be transferred in the process of backing up from drive to drive?
I know I’m able to play back media files, and projects – but are these errors “in” those files and have therefore permanently screwed them up?
Am I in deep trouble here?

What should be my next step having received this feedback.

Thanks for helping to clear this up.

[David Telling]

Hi Bob,

I do not believe this is a loose connection/bad cable issue. Every time the system has frozen up, the green light has still been lit on the X4P card.

Before trying the other chassis, I have been looking to exhaust all other possibilities on this existing chassis. As you know, the Tempo card and cable are new. I also exchanged the power cable. Since we last spoke, the system has frozen a number of times and the problem isn’t just limited to being in a Final Cut Project. I opened a movie within Quick Time, had no problem playing it or swiping through the timeline, but when I left it for a while and returned back to it, merely moving the mouse, caused the rainbow wheel to return.

The first time this happened the blue lights were lit in bays 1, 2, 4, and 5 leading me to believe that the problem was following the drive which I had moved from bay 2 to bay 3. However, the next time this happened, only the blue lights in bays 1 and 4 stayed lit, with 2, 3 and 5 missing from the front, but lit in the back, so i’m still not quite sure if this is specific drive related or not.

What do you think based on this information?

I’ve also tried replicating the freezing problem without any enclosures attached and opening/playing/scanning/leaving QT files from my second internal drive. But as yet no problems have occurred.

I’m way behind on work right now and trying to scrape together media files to put on a firewire disk and edit together a draft presentation for a client. But I will be putting these 5 drives into the other enclosure and testing later tonight. I’ll keep you updated.

Thanks again.
David

[David Telling]

Mark,
Doesn’t incrementally saving as new versions of the project then also create new folders in the capture scratch folder, etc? Before you know it, you have multiple media folders for the same project. I have found that to complicate managing and archiving projects.

How do you work around this? Do you then pull all media into one capture scratch folder at the end of the project and relink to your final saved version? Or just archive all the folders at the same time?

[David Telling]

Hi Bob,

I’ve had the side panel of the G5 open since last night (with the see through plastic still inserted).

Here’s a run down of what I see from the lights (this is for the 5 x 500GB Raid 0 media “drive”):

Starting with the G5 and 500P enclosure powered down,

1. Power up the enclosure – grey power light appears at bottom front of enclosure – all 5 green bay lights light, no lights on back of enclosure
2. Power up computer –
On pressing the computers power button, immediately the green and amber lights flash on the Tempo X4P and then a moment later settle on 4 solid green lights and 3 solid amber lights (I know there is an additional amber light, which flashes immediately on start up, but this does not stay lit for some reason – this was the same with the other Tempo card).

As the computer begins its start up process – after approx. 30 seconds, those 3 amber and 4 green lights change to a single green light. Approx. 10 seconds later the amber light next to this green light flashes as the blue light in the bottom bay of the enclosure flashes. The amber light on the X4P stays on and will flash once as each subsequent blue bay light flashes on the enclosure. After each blue bay light flashes, its corresponding blue light on the back of the enclosure stays lit. When all bay lights have flashed once (taking approx. 1 minute total), they all start to flash on and off rapidly, the blue light next to the eSATA cable on the back of the enclosure comes on, and the icon for the raid appears on the desktop. The amber light on the Tempo card goes out, leaving just the single green light.

From that point onwards, the amber light flashes only when there is activity to or from the drives, as do the individual blue bay lights on the enclosure.

During operation, I really see no activity that deviates from this.

However, I do notice that the blue light activity on the front of the enclosure can be somewhat erratic as data goes back and forth, it’s not like they all flash on and off simultaneously all of the time, or in any particular sequence… there’s just a lot of light activity, some that look synchronized, some that doesn’t.

Does this all seem fairly normal?

Sorry if I’m impacting your Sunday, but it really does help having someone to bounce things off. It’s stopping me from bouncing off the walls right now.

Cheers,
David

[David Telling]

Yes, absolutely. Have all energy saver sleep settings set to never and “put the hard disk to sleep” is not checked. And, I am working with the enclosure with the 5 x 500 drives striped together as Raid 0. (The other enclosure and wiring is not connected at the moment)

Weirdest thing just happened, though… perhaps another clue?…

I decided before changing out all the drives into my second enclosure, I would simply swap the position of the drives between bay 2 and 3 in this first enclosure, thinking maybe it was a bay 2 issue, not the specific drive. Since then I have had 1 freeze in Final Cut but this time none of the blue lights displayed on the front and all the lights in the back remained lit. Also, the X4P card only had the green light lit on it, not the busy amber light. Since restarting again, I have spent approximately an hour trying to get Final Cut to freeze up. Everything was working perfectly. But then the moment I read your last message, I thought I would go to system preferences/energy saver just to confirm nothing had changed from my last settings.

As soon as I clicked back from system preferences to Final Cut, without even touching a clip or performing a keyboard stroke, up came the rainbow wheel, and froze again. There are no blue lights on the enclosure, there are 5 blue lights lit up on the back, the light next to the eSATA cable is unlit and the green and amber light on the X4P are lit. This is so weird, so erratic.

I’ve considered it being a power issue so I’ve even instaled brand new Tripp-Lite 1000VA /500W Battery Back-up UPS Systems which condition and monitor the power on a small LCD – and there’s been nothing to suggest that the power is changing erratically.

I think I will now try putting the drives in the other cabinet. If that doesn’t work, I will run the same project which is backed up to the 2 x 500 Raid 0 in the 2nd enclosure. If I get the same problems running from that set up, it should prove that it’s not a drive issue with the 5 x 500’s, correct?

Then I will retrash Final Cut preferences again, if that doesn’t work, I’ll reload Final Cut, if that doesn’t work, I’ll load a brand new system on the G5 and start reloading software from scratch.

Any interim suggestions?

Thanks again for sticking with me, Bob.
David

[David Telling]

Hi Bob,
No problem at all. I just didn’t want to be the cause of anyone’s frustration – particularly yourself who obviously takes a lot of time to help people with their difficulties, so I appreciate you helping me in any way you can, and feel free to say it in any way you like.

To give you an update, I thought I’d cracked it last night. I inserted the new Tempo X4P card, my system recognized it immediately, and, for the first time ever on start up, the drives in my “media” enclosure (5 x 500gb raid 0) went through their one by one, (15 second each) mounting process and did appear on the desktop – without requiring a restart.

Unfortunately, the Final Cut project file I was having problems with before would still freeze Final Cut on opening, and require a hard power shut down as Final Cut would not force quit. I tried a brand new cable, made absolutely sure it was inserted securely at both ends, but still the same issue. I decided to erase (secure trash) the whole project and reload my P2 media, which I was intending to do this morning.

Early this morning, before doing that, I opened up a different project, just to make sure everything was good. I played lots of clips, and swept through numerous timelines. No problem at all. Had a little breakfast, came back to the computer, made one move of the mouse, and up comes the dreaded rainbow wheel, and no way out, without a shut down. On looking at the enclosure, the blue lights on bay 1, 3, 4, 5 were solidly lit, and, on the back, the light for Bay 2 was lit. The Tempo card for port 1 (which the media enclosure is connected to) was lit green and amber. On restarting the system again, I went to the same project again and spent several more minutes successfully accessing clips and timelines. Then making a move on one clip, the same thing occurred with the same results on the enclosure. I noted the specific clip where the freeze occurred. On restarting the system again, I played that same clip (which is obviously pulling the media from the same place across the drives) time and time again with no problem. I walked away from the computer, 5 minutes later still no problem – I moved the timeline to another location, walked away for about 10 minutes to write this message and just a second ago I walked back in, clicked play and there’s the rainbow wheel again. What’s a man to do?

It appears to me that something has to be timing out. And the fact that the same drive in Bay 2 keeps hanging(?) is cause for a new concern. Interestingly, this project / Final Cut problem has only begun showing itself since I got the replacement enclosures, and again only intermittently. I’m now going to put all of the media drives from this enclosure into the second enclosure, using the new tempo card and the new cable and see what happens on start up and when I play through this project. I’d be happy for any input you have and really appreciate your time.

Thanks and regards,
David
smallisland@earthlink.net

[David Telling]

Bob,

I truly appreciate you taking the time to help me with my issues, and I sincerely apologize if I confused or maddened you with one of my posts. If you read again what I said about the MOTU Card, I did say that I had removed it:

“I did have to remove a Mark of the Unicorn PCI 424 Audio Card from slot 2 because it drastically cut down on the speed of the SATA system”

However, I should have been clearer. A potential issue with the MOTU was something I was aware of from the outset and therefore one of the first things I checked out once I set up the system. I had read that slower PCI-X cards in slot 2 would drag down the speed of a faster card in slot 3 or vice-versa (Slot 4 being independent). Since MOTU tech support told me they were unaware of that issue and their rep could not offer information on the speed of the PCI 424 card, I had to test the system myself with the MOTU card in to see if it would indeed decrease transfer speed. So after my initial set up with just the Kona (Slot 4) and the X4P (Slot 3) I did introduce the MOTU card in Slot 2. As soon as I noted (via the Kona System Test) that the drive read/writes went down considerably, I removed the MOTU card from the set up. That was 6 weeks ago (four days after I got the system up and running) and the MOTU card has not been present since. As the start up issue and occasional “missing drives” had already manifested itself, I don’t think this test added to any issues, but I could be wrong. Again, I’m sorry if I wasn’t detailed enough about that… I’m certainly not trying to hide something, just wasn’t sure how much is appropriate to divulge in this type of forum.

I want you to know that I’ve been involved in multimedia and video work for 19 years – this is my livelihood and I take it very seriously. I have been through so many heart-wrenching conflict issues over those years – including Jazz drive problems (a long time ago), La Cie power supply issues – this not working with that, not working with this, etc. Issues have cost me weeks, if not months of anguish, and unfortunately, my experience is, most of the time manufacturer customer support can’t tell you (or are not willing to tell you) what’s conflicting or not, and it takes a lot of trial and error, gut wrenching time and effort – and, fortunately for me, people like you to truly help me out.

Consequently, as I said in my first post: “I have a fairly streamined Audio/Video only system” and I try my utmost to keep conflicting stuff off of it. However I do still use lots of tools – i.e mostly Apples multimedia products (Final Cut Pro/Motion/Compressor/Soundtrack/DVD Studio Pro/Logic Pro, etc) as well as the Adobe standard, Photoshop (no After Effects on this machine). I’ve tried to be Apple based or fairly “mainstream” for everything, but I guess there are plenty of other things that I occasionally use that could cause conflicts (DFT 55mm or Nattress filters? Sound Soap 2? Squeeze? – I don’t exactly know how much information is needed to narrow down potential solutions. I think the software and hardware I possess are the types of things everyone is using for professional purposes and is frequently referred to/reviewed at Creative Cow but I would be happy to go as deep into them as you might need me too (if you have the time).

Continuing with your last post, though – there are no PCI Firewire Cards or other cards in my system. I do occasionally need to attach firewire drives to the system in order to transfer P2 files captured on location, but once that data has been transferred to the G5 via the firewire 400 port on the front of the computer, the drives are normally disconnected.

As I said in my third post – I did connect some firewire drives to the front port of my G5 to test the copying of Final Cut Autosave files (saved to my system disk) that for some reason would not copy to my 5 x 500 media RAID in one of the Fusion 500P cabinets (infinite spinning color wheel). Those same files copied without problem to these firewire drives and the additional internal 250 Gb drive I have in the second internal drive port of the G5.

If there is one other piece of hardware I may need to tell you about (now that the MOTU PCI 424 card and 2408 rack mount it was originally connected to are no longer being used) – I do have a MOTU Traveller occasionally connected via the computer’s rear firewire 400 port. This is used for multitrack recording work we do within Logic Pro 7.2. I admit I have used that for a half day project, but didn’t consider it to be a source of any issues, but perhaps it might be and I should probably have stated that I use it from time to time. It does have a Firewire Audio Driver and that could be an issue.

Regarding testing the system on the other G5 (Dual 2GB Power PC) – there were no additional PCI cards, just the Tempo X4P and no other drives connected except a second internal 250 Gb SATA drive. On this computer System Profiler recognized the Tempo straight away (but I believe from Sonnet technical support that is because the 2.03 firmware I downloaded would have already “flashed the card?. I have now tried starting up the system with both enclosures independently, and with both connected together. None of the drives show up from a start up in any configuration, but do appear on restarts. I haven’t had an opportunity today to test files, as yet. That’s next.

I have just returned from purchasing 2 new eSATA cables and the new Tempo X4P I purchased was waiting on my door step, I am now going to try those components tonight (one by one) to see if anything changes. Just hoping that I can again work in Final Cut without the freezing. If not I will erase the most recent project that seems to be the main problem and begin loading in the media from scratch to see if that will stop the symptoms. I’ll just have to wait and see if any drives continue to disappear.

Again, I hope I did not upset you in any of my posts. If I did, it was certainly not my intention. I hope you can still offer me the benefit of your expertise and experience and I am more than happy to answer any questions and consider any options you might have.

Thank you Bob.