[Francois Stark]

Not when you have many listeners.

Many people read this forum, without letting anybody know about it…

I’m glad a 5.1 reinstall fixed your problem. I’m in control of a total of 8 machines, 7 of which are stuck on 5.0 (some even on 4.5), and one new machine on 5.1. I’ve sent my disks for the 7 5.1 upgrades 6 weeks ago. The ONLY legal distributor for Apple in South Africa, Core, can not even give me an ETA for the upgrades. The 5.1 system is supposed to feed the other systems work, but they can not open it’s projects. And don’t believe for a second that XML works as it should to downgrade projects. That’s the kind of loyalty an FCP user(From version 2) can expect from Apple today.

Talk about talking to myself… I don’t really expect an answer on that little tidbit – just had to throw it in there.

Best
Francois

[Francois Stark]

So here’s my experience with it…

– The fibre channel interface oes not support load sharing or fail-over yet. Plasmon are allegedly working on it.
– I lost one partition after an array shutdown caused by a firmware upgrade – had to reformat and recapture 60 tapes!
– The current firmware does not properly support the seagate 500GB drives. Guess what they sold me: an array filled with seagate 500GB drives – 6TB in all… What happens is that almost every time the array is switched off and on again, one of the drives just shows “not used”, and it is not part of a raid array anymore. 5 minutes later, the FS3102 starts rebuilding the raid array to it’s hot spare. Every time after a power=down, it is another drive that shows “not used”. I’m dreading the case where two drives are “not used”, because then all my data will be gone. Again.
Plasmon suggested I downgrade to a previous version of firmware, but I don’t trust that anymore. I’d rather keep the power up, and keep it running until they release new firmware that works properly with these drives.

So… this array is really not ready for prime-time yet.

Regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Hi Chrispy

The only time I had intermittent problems with dropped frames was when sanmp’s autosync feature was switched on. That was my first thought as I read your description.

But if you ran the FCP systems direct from the Apple drive array, hfs+, you’re not using sanmp, which means you were not using autosync. Were the other two machines still conected to the san at that stage?

If not, it seems like there is a serious problem with the Apple XServeRAID array, because you were running it as a pure standalone storage unit and it still dropped frames! In that case, your problem has nothing to do with the san.

regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Hi Chrispy and Nate

I feel I have to come in here. We’ve had SanMP for about 17 months now – 4 FCP suites and 3 Pro Tools suites.

When we started out, on Panther (os X.3) Sync was working. But autosync on one station would always stop any capture or playback on that system when it syncs, so we disabled it. Manual sync is more efficient – you know when the system syncs, and you do it when not capturing or playing out.

Then sync stopped working in Tiger for os X.4.1 to X.4.5. Recently SanMP released a software update (V1.6) that works from os X.4.6, with sync re-enabled again. I’ve had some problems installing this update, and I’m still not sure if the actual update or a seperate hardware problem caused
the problems. I’m starting a seperate thread on this issue.

I have not tried it with Pictureready, but it seems like this would work quite well. You should be able to edit from the clip being captured, and every time you hit sync, you get more material to work with.

Regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Hi Bart

I was just thinking about this, since I need to expand. This would mean a Mac Pro (Intel – needs this sanmp universal binary), and a new fibre channel drive array. If I consider the Huge range (4105, 4110 etc) I run into problems, because they only have one LU each. And sanMP needs more LU’s to split into more write volumes…

Which drive arrays (besides ADTX) would you suggest that can split into more LU’s?

Thanks
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Hi

I did deselect all and zoom in and out – didn’t help. And no, my audio was not linked to video – it was a voice-over recorded on Pro Tools and read direct from a win2003 server over gig-e into FCP.

By the way, when I told my one editor about this issue, he told me about a job he’s doing on a new Avid Adrenaline at our one national broadcaster: He also had a 30 minute clip and he wanted to use the waveform to cut where people spoke. After enabling the waveform display on the timeline he took a smokebreak; three minutes later it was still totally unresponsive – calculating waveform display… This in a very fast, shared 16TB storage system with four adrenaline seats.

I’ll try deleting the waveform cache and see how that works. It still seems a pity that you have to do something like this to get waveform to work properly.

Thanks
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Two G5’s:
1 DP 2.0GHz, 3.5GB Ram, FCP 5.0.4, os X.4.3
1 DP2.7GHz, 4.5GB Ram, FCP 5.0.4, os X.4.3

[Francois Stark]

First if all: strictly speaking there is no such thing as 24P PAL.

PAL is by definition 50i, or if your source (such as animation) is progressively scanned, 25p.

I am trying to understand where you come from. How do you generate your 24p source? File sequences from animation? In which case, why not just use Quictime Pro to save the sequences as 25p, and import and sync your sound in FCP? From that point, the project lives in 25p.

Alternatively, you could be working on a old project containing lots of 24p clips from igniter.

In which case you’re stuck…

regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Hi Chip

Any consumer/prosumer drive array system will fail eventually. Four-drive raid 0 arrays are four times more likely to fail than single drive enclosures.

That’s a part of life – accept it. That’s why my main media storage is a ADTX 15 drive array with dual, fully redundant controllers. This array can keep working with any single drive, controller, fan or power supply failure.

What gets to me is that La Cie/Maxtec will not repair the array locally once it fails outside its warantee!

F

[Francois Stark]

Hi Wally

The drive is not in my hands anymore. The reseller tested it and found the control card faulty.

What I’ve found to work in this situation is to simply leave my Mac and the Drive running overnight or at least for 2 hours. Just let them sit there or you can also launch Disk Utility which will spin forever as it tries to see all the drives. After a few hours or overnight, the drive usually shows up mounted.

Wow, Wally – how often does this happen to you? I hope it is with your older drives – the ones you use for backup…

I’m running with journalling and this has saved many drives from corruption. When I boot in verbose mode after a dirty shutdown, I can see the drive replaying or undoing the last journal entries, and that’s that. Solved.

Now Posting:
Generations – South Africa’s largest daily 26 min soapy (in viewership) for the past 8 years – continously;
Binnelanders – one hour per week mixed single cam/multicam hospital drama series; The first 54 episode 1 hour drama series single contract in SA, now in it’s second series (we switched to 4 half hours per week – doubling the pace);
Two of South Africa’s large four banks edit some of their weekly internal communication with us.
And lot’s of smaller stuff in between.

All of this on two avids, four FCP’s and four Pro Tools suites.

F