[Ed Dooley]

750G drives are already out, and all the reports I’ve read about 1TB drives is that they’ll be out in 2007.
A long way from my first array using the biggest drives in the world at the time, 3g drives, each costing
$3,600. My 4 drive, 11 1/2 gig array cost $14,400!
Ed

[David Roth Weiss] “Regardless of the benchmarks, at $199.90 I’ll settle. I’m gonna be striping (4) 500gb drives together anyway, and I doubt the slight differences in speed will mean much anyway. BTW, I’m guessing the 1-terrabyte drives are on the way soon, so they’re liquidating everything else as fast as possible.”

[Ed Dooley]

I became a fan of the Maxlines too. There was no way that I would have bought a Maxtor drive until
they changed their ways, and the Maxline’s reliability and performance proved it (and a 5 year warranty these days is pretty good too).
As for the Barefeats.com review, they often do a first look at a drive, then go back later for another look
and/or to compare it to other drives as they come out. I don’t doubt that you saw a good review, the ones
I referenced didn’t gush over the Hitachi, but others that I didn’t see might have compared it to a whole
different set of drives where it excelled, or did a RAID test or comparison.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

But remember that to use ON2VP6 the viewer needs to have the latest version of flash, not everyone has that, or can/want to downolad it.
It’s just like using H.264, you need QT7 to view those files. If your audience is bleeding edge, go for it. The quality
is so much better, if they’ll see it.
Ed

[John Fishback] “And use the On2 VP6 codec. It far surpasses the SparkPro codec both in quality and size. You can purchase a version of Squeeze for Flash only. The VP6 codec, however, is an additional purchase.”

[Ed Dooley]

But remember that to use ON2VP6 the viewer needs to have the latest version of flash, not everyone has that, or can/want to downolad it.
It’s just like using H.264, you need QT7 to view those files. If your audience is bleeding edge, go for it. The quality
is so much better, if they’ll see it.
Ed

[John Fishback] “And use the On2 VP6 codec. It far surpasses the SparkPro codec both in quality and size. You can purchase a version of Squeeze for Flash only. The VP6 codec, however, is an additional purchase.”

[Ed Dooley]

It may be a good drive, but to say it’s “highly recommended” by Barefeats seems a misreading of their report:
Ed (not dissing the drive, just saying it’s not tops by Barefeats)

>>>From Barefeats.com 6/27:
The Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 came in second on the Photoshop Rotate test and beat the MaXLine in the ZoneBench test at the 270GB mark, but was third or fourth in the other tests. Its main strength is its half terabyte capacity. Though it has a 16MB internal cache (just like the MaXLine III), that didn’t seem to help it keep up with the MaXLine III, the only other drive with 16MB buffer.
The Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 250GB SATA II is a not a slow drive. It’s just not as fast as the others tested.<<< From Barefeats.com 7/07/06: MORE CONFIDENT OPTIONS We still feel the Maxtor MaXLine III (7V300F0) with its speed and 5 year warranty is the best 300GB SATA drive you can buy. If you need bigger, we think the Hitachi 7K500 and the WD5000KS are solid performers. [David Roth Weiss] “At http://www.mwave.com Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K500 SATA-II drives, their latest 500gb SATA drives, very highly recommended by both Firmtek and Barefeet, are on sale for just $199.90 apeice. Imagine, 2 terrabytes at under $800, its incredible. I’ve got four coming next week.”

[Ed Dooley]

The path is Library/Application Support/FCP System Support/Custom Settings
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

On the really thin lines, do a vertical blur to spread them out over a couple of scan lines.
Don’t do a horizontal blur, it’s not necessary.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

You can go into the Library where the presets are kept and manually pull them out into another folder.
Library/FinalCutProSystem Support/Custom Settings. I think it’s as simple as creating another folder
right in the FCP System Support folder and putting the rarely used settings there. Move them back when you need them.
Trash your prefs too.
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

This may not help, but it’s close enough to your problem to suggest it. I just had problems with
a 4 drive ATA RAID, where I was getting the same problems as you’re describing. Tech Tool Pro
said the drives were fine (using the drive’s SMART function). I was able to rebuild the directory
for the RAID with Disk Warrior, but I was still getting errors, and when I opened the RAID onto the
desktop it would say there were tons of files in the folder, but they wouldn’t show up. All the files on the RAID
were video so I did a Find, looking for Type/Movies. I was able to copy all the files from the Find window
to another RAID. I did a surface scan of the individual RAID drives and it turned out that one drive had over 500 bad
blocks. I erased all the drives and wrote zeros to them (which can fix bad blocks), re-striped them and they’re working fine now.
Have you tried Disk Warrior to rebuild the directory? Have you used Tech Tool or Disk Utility to check
the drives?
Ed

[Ed Dooley]

An uncompressed AIFF file (PCM) could give you a larger audio file than your video. I would rather
put the extra bandwidth into higher quality video.
My 2 cents,
Ed

[Ben Cruz] “I have been using compressor to export files with H264 for the web.
For audio I have been using Linear PCM and have never had problems.
Don’t know if that’s the best option but it seems to work.”