[Doug Metz]

Are you waiting for each segment to finish before exporting the next, or are you slammin’ and jammin’ all of them quickly so that they stack up in a render queue?

Are you using external drive or internal – if external, what kind and which interface?

EDIT: asked for specs, then saw them in the original post. Whoops!

[Doug Metz]

Well, all of this has me wondering if there’s something in the individual drive’s firmware, or some LaCie software that has a separate control or trigger for spin down.

If you’re formatting / setting up whatever external with macOS Disk Utility, the manufacturer’s software is often unnecessary, and sometimes counterproductive.

[Doug Metz]

For anyone interested:

On an M1 laptop with Ventura, the Energy Saver pane is replaced by a Battery pane.

In System Settings, go to the Battery pane, scroll down to the bottom, and hit the ‘Options…’ button. There you’ll find the disk sleep setting, wake for network access, and HDR to SDR video when on battery setting.

[Doug Metz]

Hi Anne,

When you try to share a master for this project, how does it fail, and how far does it let you go into the process of exporting? Any error messages? The more detail here the better.

Do you have the same issue exporting a master file from every project / library, or is it just this specific one?

[Doug Metz]

Ahhh, I misunderstood the OP. I have and can see Show/Hide Sidebar, and it works as expected.

I got hung up on the word Library specifically, and wondered why you’d bother to hide library icons, but retain the events / keywords.

[Doug Metz]

I didn’t know that was even a thing… so what did it do, just hide the library icon in the browser?

I wasn’t able to find it either (I’m current).

[Doug Metz]

Not sure if you’ve resolved this already, but you’ve got 100 tapes… seems like it would totally be worth the effort to set up the old Mini with FCS, with proper log & capture, cinema tools, etc.

Hang some external storage on there, point your capture scratch folder at it, and let it cook.

[Doug Metz]

I’m having involuntary eye twitches thinking about this…

First and foremost, you didn’t say whether you’ve got a consistent, regular backup system. In a RAID0 configuration, any one drive failure in the set will cause all of your data to be lost, right now. If you’ve ever had a spinner fail, you know that RAID0 is only for disposable, don’t-care-if-it-dies-unexpectedly storage.

Second, volume format can play a significant role. For spinning disks on a Mac, I’d stick with HFS+, as APFS is optimized for SSDs and can bog down a mechanical disk. ExFAT and FAT32 don’t have robust journaling and can cause problems with databases and certain types of file metadata, so I only use those when I’ve got to share a drive with a Windows box.

In the Energy Saver pane of system prefs, there’s a toggle for spinning down when possible. If this is turned off, and you’ve done the terminal command, and it’s still spinning down, zapping PRAM and/or resetting the SMC could resolve it on an Intel Mac. No such options on the AS models.

I’ve had a several different RAIDs, and the most trouble-free experience was with an Areca 8-bay Thunderbolt 2 box loaded with 2TB spinners in a RAID6 config. Glad I had the 2-disk failsafe, because I had a drive fail and during the rebuild a second drive failed. Didn’t lose anything except a little time.

Right now, I’m using an OWC Thunderbay 8 loaded with SSDs, configured with SoftRAID. It hasn’t been quite so reliable, but it is always blazingly fast. I run nightly LTO backups, and do a weekly clone to another old box so I can sleep at night.

EDIT: As for the BMD Multidock, Disk Utility has the ability to take multiple attached disks and create a RAID, though it is fairly limited in its options.

[Doug Metz]

How do you have your subtitles in FCP?

If they’re already captions, you can easily reassign them: Default is iTT – right-click one of your captions on the timeline, Edit Roles…, add SRT (close), right click again and reassign to SRT. Then when you export your project, you’ll select your SRT Caption output on the Roles tab of the Export panel.

If your subtitles are actually text generators, that’ll be a bit more tedious.

[Doug Metz]

FCP’s architecture is absolutely suitable. Preferable, even.

As Ben said above, learn to use the very powerful multicam feature. Keep in mind, as with any NLE working with multiple streams, your workflow, storage, and setup will be instrumental to your success.