[Ken Jones]

My guess is that the scratch disk drive is formatted as FAT32. FAT32 only allows a max file size of 2GB. Reformat the drive as a “Mac OS Extended”.

[Ken Jones]

So far I haven’t done any archiving. I bought one 32GB class 6 SDHC card and haven’t filled it up yet. I am considering archiving the SDHC cards and just buying a new one. My local Micro Center sells the class 6 32GB cards for $75@ and the 16GB cards for $35@.

I have no idea on why FCP log & transfer wouldn’t work at first. It worked this morning. I am not sure what you mean by “go back and capture “frame accurately” from a flash drive”. The media is transferred just like a P2 card – using log and transfer. As far as time-code, every clip starts with 00:00:00:00.

[Ken Jones]

Have you tried restarting your computer?

[Ken Jones]

Wow! That is a really long render time. What computer are you using?
If you have a Mac Pro you can significantly decrease your render times. Check this out:
https://www.slccut.com/Apple-Compressor-Tutorials/enable-multiple-core-processing-in-apple-compressor.html

[Ken Jones]

I bought a Canon VIXIA HF S100. The image quality is simply amazing for such a tiny camera. I bought it for under $1,000. In comparison, the HF S10 is the same camera except it has a 32 GB hard drive in addition to SDHC card recording and has a street price of about an additional $150.

Initially FCP would not recognize the media in log & capture. I tried again a few days later and it worked perfectly. I am not sure why it did not work the first time.

I highly recommend this camera for a personal camera, but the image quality is so good I have actually used it as a second camera on some of my pro shoots.

[Ken Jones]

I have never used it, but I saw some people saying they use Levelator:
https://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator/

Do a search for Levelator in this forum to see others opinions.

[Ken Jones]

David – all points understood, but…

[David Roth Weiss] “one render or one change in the timeline make a reference file completely NG. “

Wouldn’t one change in the timeline also make a self contained movie no good?
You would have to re-export either a self contained or a reference movie.
Granted, once you delete the original media and renders a reference movie does you no good.

In my tests, a self contained movie takes about 10X longer to output than a reference movie. If you are working on a deadline with long sequences (such as a 60-90 minute church service) a reference movie is a lot quicker.

[Ken Jones]

I’ve been using Synchronize X Plus for about a year and have been very happy with it.

My set up inside my Mac Pro is:
Drive 1: System HD
Drive 2: System HD Backup
Drive 3: Resources (production music, graphics, general stuff I use all the time for multiple clients)
Drive 4: Resources Backup

My media is written to a 7.5TB eSATA (port multiplier) RAID 0 tower with five 1.5TB drives.
I have an identical 7.5TB RAID 0 tower Backup.

Synchronize X Plus runs every night and does three backups:
3:00 AM – backup “System HD” to “System HD Backup”
3:30 AM – backup “Resources” to “Resources Backup”
4:00 AM – backup “RAID” to “RAID Backup”

I still shoot everything on tape (HDV, DV, BetaSP) so I don’t really require any backup of shot media besides the original tapes.

[Ken Jones]

If you want to save even more time make a “Quicktime Reference Movie” instead of a self contained movie. This is especially useful if you are exporting long sequences. Drop the QT ref movie into Compressor and set up a batch for output to your different formats. Batch Monitor will render your movies. You can then go back and work on other projects in FCP while Batch Monitor works in the background.

[Ken Jones]

[Bob Flood] “double check that the menu settings on the beta are set correctly (i think you have a menu choice as to whether the beta gets External Reference from Video In or Ref In) “

This was my first thought. Since your deck was just serviced, the repair shop might have reset the deck to its default settings.