[Digihead]

Hi David,

Ken’s suggestion is a good one. You need to systematically (it’s a painfully slow process) isolate every possible factor. Swapping enclosures would be my 1st– it’s a quick test with hot swap trays. If it really looks not to be the enclosure, try moving the files to firewire drives, see what happens then.
I’d also get a small firewire drive and do a fresh install of OSX and FCP from the bottom up. Boot off that drive and see what happens.Start with a brand new Final Cut Pro Session. Import P2 media not associated with your problem job, if all is good then open the problem job–copy the clips in your timeline and paste into new project. If the problem goes away — software is your culprit.

I have to put up a vote for using softraid. It monitors the i/o’s and will warn of i/o errors if one occurs while you are working. The nice thing is if you have an error you can see which drive in a raid exhibited the i/o error. Huge time saver when you are troubleshooting.

Good luck working this out

[Digihead]

David,
If your Final Cut Project is corrupt: 1st try creating a new project, then take the corrupt sequence, select all clips and copy, then paste into new sequence in the new project. I’ve used this in the past to successfully get rid of weird sequence problems. I recently had a client deliver me a Final Cut Project. They mentioned they could not get audio to capture on many of the reels– sure enough I had the same problem on my system with their project. I media managed the sequence–still no go, try XML –same problem. As a last resort I exported an edl, and then imported it into a new project–finally I was able to successfully recapture. EDL is the best way to be sure to go rid of any corruption in a sequence. Everything has been smooth since with the project.
Oh, I also run Protools LE (Firewire connect) on my system with no conflicts.
Hope your new cables work out for you.
Tony

[Digihead]

Hi David,
If I start up or restart, the drives on the port multiplier mount after the two internal drives–one minute later, in fact.
If I’m close to the Fusion 500P enclosures I can hear the individual disks spinning up one by one, then once all the disks have spun up, the raid icon appears on the desktop. It always behaves this way, it’s been reliable, so I feel it’s normal.

Try reseating your X4p, try a different pci slot, you might need to reload your Final Cut Pro, or even OSX software. If that doesn’t work you might have to wonder about a hard drive(s) in you set-up. If you’re not using Softraid, you might want try it. I prefer it to Disk Utility for creating raid sets. Better control and monitoring of the raid set.

All I can say is — if it’s any consolation — my Sonnet Raid set has been rock solid. (knock on wood)

[Digihead]

I’m thrilled with my Sonnet SATA Port Multiplier drive set-up.

I have been using a Sonnet X4P, 2 Sonnet Fusion 500P’s, with 10 Seagate 7200.10 320GB hard drives striped Raid 0 with SoftRaid 3.5. I have the KonaLH in a dual 2.7 G5 with 3.5GB Ram. It’s performed flawlessly for me with 10Bit Uncompressed 1080i. Never drops frames. The 10 drive Raid never fails to mount (no restart necessary), although you have to be patient, it takes a minute as the system goes through each of the 10 drives one by one before it mounts the Raid Set on your desktop. I too had one of the enclosures with the noisy power supply. Sonnet support was very good about replacing it with a new super quiet 500P enclosure. I just bought a third Fusion500P enclosure I’m so pleased with the performance.

Sorry to hear about your problems. If you are not using all the drives in both cases, try creating raid sets that span the two enclosures. You’ll get higher speed spanning the raid set over two ports of your port multiplier.

Good luck trouble-shooting.
Tony

[Digihead]

Hi David,
If you’re worried about sea sickness, I’d forget about pills and go with the ‘Transderm Scop’ Patch. It has scopolomine. It comes in a little patch (a small round band-aid about the size of a nickel) which you place behind and below your ear. I’ve used the patch on several scuba diving trips where I spent over a week aboard. In some very rough seas I was fine, whereas others who relied on pills were very ill. I experienced no side effects – just avoid alcohol. Check it out. It might save the day for you.

[Digihead]

Sadly, Protools does not support faster-than-realtime bouncing. Inspite of years of requests, and many competitors having this capability. I wouldn’t use Protools to sweeten chunks of audio (which assume you plan to import back into NLE). Try another application for that. Otherwise, in protools process your audio with audiosuite(actually crunching the file-not via plug-in) and then export the resulting files with the ‘export files as’ command. Cumbersome, but at least it is not realtime so with long files its much faster.

Protools strength is to edit, sweeten and mix your entire soundtrack, which will then require only one RT Bounce at the end.

[Digihead]

I experienced the exact same problem with my IO/LA. It only reared its head with 10bitUC timelines. The exact same footage pasted into an 8bitUC timeline did not go below zero. AJA, although responsive, did not have an answer. I ended up dropping in a ‘Joe’s Filter’. His LEVELS filter, if dropped onto the clip/ or nested sequence eliminates all of the below zero instances. I didn’t even have to tweak it at all. Perhaps another alternative to adjusting the black level with fcp color corrector is to try changing your gamma with the gamma correction filter– try a value of 1.1 or 1.2. This will give you a ‘darker’ or deeper look, without lowering the absolute black level below zero.

[Digihead]

You could clone your startup disk to an external firewire hard disk and use that as your startup disk at your destination. That way you’ll have everything that your home-based computer has.

[Digihead]

You can email the whole Final Cut Project file, or if you like create a new Project file and drag the bin you want to send into it. Save it and then email it. It’s as easy as that.