[Jerry Alto]

John- A couple of timeline navagation tips. Timeline fit to window: Shift Z. Zoom in/out with playhead centered: be sure NOTHING is selected then Apple =(+) for zoom in, Apple – for zoom out. For some reason the default is to zoom in on anything selected.
Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Lee- First, quit out of FCP then turn your deck off and disconnect the firewire cable. Turn the deck back on again with your firewire cable disconnected. Do not reconnect until you have all the i/o settings correct. . Go to the IN/OUT REC menu on the deck. Set VCR HDV/DV to AUTO. Rotate down to i.LINK CONV and set to ON. Rotate down to DOWN CONVERT and choose the format you want to edit in; squeeze, letterbox, edge crop.

Now plug the firewire cable into the computer THEN plug the firewire into the deck.

Launch your FCP5 project. In FCP go to audio/video settings log and capture tab and set your proper settings.

Hope this solves the issue.

Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Trinity- Recently struggled going off to HDV. My problem is on the a/v devices tab in FCP5 audio/video settings. On the print to tape function I had to check different output for edit to tape/print to video. Found HDV native setting.
Hope this helps.
Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Thanks Jeremy, I’ll give that a try.
Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Thanks guys, it was pilot error in the audio/video settings in FCP….. in AV devices I had not checked the ‘different output for Edit to Tape/Print to Video’

Some things I learned;

. Make sure camera/deck is set to HDV
. Preset the timecode and make sure TC Make is in preset
. Attach firewire from the deck/camera BEFORE launching FCP5.
. FCP Audio/Video Settings ‘AV devices’ tab lower half checked & HDV (1440×1080) is selected and mirror on desktop is checked. Device control tab; I used Sony HDV firewire (duh).

Workflow: Mastering to HDV for HD master then output from HDV deck SD 4:3 component to DigiBeta component analog inputs for SD DigiBeta Master.

This is a new area for an old dog but damn it does look good! Does this mean I can kiss the old Betacam and its compacitor meltdown goodby?
Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Michael and David- Thanks for your quick response. Yes I went thru the whole conform process. I guess I’ll dump my preferences next. I keep getting this response on my deck and it wont go away, ‘Changes not allowed. Unplug i.Link cable’\.’
Of course I’ve unplugged the cable 50 times but the message will not go away.’
Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

iMan- No jumpers or pins with SATA. Format from Disk Utility (applications>utilities>Disk Utility).
Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Michael- Been using a sata raid system (2X250GB) for over a year with very few problems. We do betacam sp digitized at 8-bit uncompressed and our timelines are all 8-bit uncompressed. In the past we mastered back to Beta SP but recently our dub house bought a G-5 with FCP and we’ve been delivering them 8-bit Quicktime movies of our half hour show (about 30GBs) on lacie drives. They copy to their 2nd internal sata drive and are going off to Digibeta SDI. We’ve been very pleased with our sata raid O.
Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Mark- Sounds like you are on the right track. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you. Let me know how it works out and any new info on SATA raids.

Jerry

[Jerry Alto]

Mark- We have been running a SATA array (2×250) for over a year. Recently we added two new drives and put all four drives into a new 4-bay SATA external enclosure (we stayed with our two channel PCI SATA controller). We definitely had some issues when we tried to mount the new drives. Then we had issues when we tried to remount the old drives and we thought we had lost all of our FCP project media files.

We eventually got the old raid remounted but it had created a LOST folder and inside that folder was four additional folders that had all of our media files from our FCP projects. We had to rebuild our FCP file directories to get everything going again.

What I recomend you try if you have media files you want to save on your original drives;

Shut everything down. Re-intstall your old SATA controller card and be sure to plug in the same controller outlet to the exact same drive as you had it before. Fire up the drives till they are up to speed then boot up. Hopefully your original raid will be on the desk top and you are back in business.

Then back up that raid onto an external firewire drive (can be time consuming if you have lots of media but its worth it.)

Unmount the orignal raid using disk utility (this is probably where your problem started if you didn’t do this when installed your new controller card).

Shut everything down.

Re-install the new 4-port PCI card and connect the four drives.

Start up the drives til they are up to speed then boot-up the computer.

Hopefully a dialog box will ask about new drives and you go to disk utility and if its a good day your old raid will be there and you select it and click the blue MOUNT button. Then you should have two blank drives there and you build a second raid.

If the old drives are there but not as a raid you’ll have to format them (which will erase them) as a new raid. Then you’ll have to copy over the media files you backed up on the firewire drive>launch FCP project and relink your media.

Some things we’ve learned:
1. They say SATA are hot swappable but you’d better know exactly what your doing before you try it.
2. Before you install new drives or new PCI cards you need to UNMOUNT the old drives before you boot down.
3. You don’t unmount the drive by right clicking on it and choose eject. You go to Disk Utility>Select Raid>Unmount (blue button on top).
3. Keeping connections from the proper SATA connector to the correct drive is very important once the raid has been established.
4. The computer KNOWS when PCI cards, hard drives or SATA cables have been switched.
5. FCP knows that you have swictched drives and you have to reset scratch drives.

Remember, this is from one situation so I’m no expert. I thought I would pass on what I THINK I’ve learned.

Hope this helps.
Jerry