Martin Nelson
Forum Replies Created
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Yesterday we pulled my 3 Samsung 1TB drives and replaced them with 4 2TB Hitachi 7200rpm 32MB SATA II Deskstar drives. There’s no RAID, but each drive is partitioned in two. One partition is formatted to be my FCP startup drive and FCP is freshly installed on it. All updates are run. We also pulled the RAM and put in 6 x 2GB of OWC RAM. We then copied six of the seven external drives over to the internal, renaming everything so the internal drives now are named what the external used to be.
Before copying the seventh drive, I figured it was time to run some tests. All external drives are disconnected from the computer. I launch, I play the sequence where it lays. The clip plays, but throws up pink frames and green frames and then quickly crashes. Crash Analyzer (https://www.digitalrebellion.com/fcs_maintenance.htm) says “corrupt media,” but Corrupt Clip Finder (same link) finds none.
I run Disk Warrior — directories are pretty messy, but clean up nice. I run Disk Utility and everything appears to be fine except for the partition that is the other half of the startup drive. Steve, my tech thinks that the external hard drive that was the source for this media had a problem copying and I should erase this partition and copy again. I’ll do this eventually, but for the time being I take this one offline.
I launch FCP again. It plays briefly then crashes. Crash Analyzer says “Graphics Card / Driver Issue,” says “A common cause of issues is running Final Cut Studio on an underpowered graphics card.”
Well, I’ve got the Radeon HD 4870 sitting here in a box. I hook ‘er up, run software updates just to be sure, launch FCP and stand back. It loads the project (this takes about 10 minutes because of the size) and then announces at 100% of the load, “This project is unreadable or may be too new for this version of Final Cut.” This project crashed yesterday, but it did first launch. I start digging through the Autosave Vault to find a project file that’ll launch, but they all give me this.
So I quit, take all media and render files offline and launch again. I scroll around a little, play various parts of my long, entirely offline sequence and then, after 30 seconds or so, it crashes. Crash Analyzer says “This crash was caused by corrupt media or media that is unsupported by Final Cut Pro.” Again, there is no media online.
I want my mommy.
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.2
Quicktime 7.6.6
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20 -
Ah, my bad, David. I’ve had at least as much conversation on this problem offline as I have on; I forget which discussions have taken place where. Ideally, I’d like to do a RAID 5 so I get nearly as much space as I need, but still get redundancy.
What I should have written was, “I know I can’t do a RAID 5 internally.” We may well do a RAID 0.
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.2
Quicktime 7.6.6
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20 -
Thanks B.J. and Philippe,
Tomorrow we’re stuffing my CPU like a Thanksgiving turkey. We’re putting four Hitachi 2TB drives inside and moving the original internal drive to the hidden slot under the optical drive. I know we can’t RAID them internally, but I have a full set of backup drives and once I’ve copied all the LaCies, they’ll be a second set of backups. When the project is over, my producer can buy an enclosure for those drives and RAID them for her next project.
Just for overkill, we’re also upping my RAM to 12GB (from OWC, as are the drives) and installing the ATI Radeon HD 4870 Graphics card. We’re hitting this from every possible direction; I’ve got to get back up and running.
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.2
Quicktime 7.6.6
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20 -
“That’s how a three-disk raid-set might show up….
You would need to create a new single Partition to get rid of all the junk – an Erase isn’t enough.”Thanks, Paul. You have any reason to think that would be creating any problems?
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.2
Quicktime 7.6.6
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20 -
I successfully ran FCP this morning with all the external drives (that is, all media) offline. I played a long sequence, I jumped around, I basically did the sort of things that would cause it to wig out if the media were online. No problem. I then mounted the two most recent, most important, drives —Let’s call them Ted and Quentin— and figured, before launching FCP again, I’d run Disk Utility on them. I noticed something interesting, but possibly not relevant.
When Quentin is mounted, it shows up as it should in the left column of Disc Utility. But also showing up in that left column is the following:
931.5 GB LaCie d2Next-Quadra Media
disk5s2
disk5s3
disk5s4These disks are all grayed out and if I attempt to mount them, I get a could not be mounted error. These phantom disks are in some way associated with Quentin as they don’t come up if I only mount Ted.
Is this at all relevant? I have no idea. But having opened my Pandora’s box on you generous few, I fear closing it and sealing in hope.
Geez, that was vague and flowery. Maybe I need some sleep.
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.2
Quicktime 7.6.6
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20 -
“…the cure was a brand new internal system drive, not a reformatted one. Complete reinstall of everything and problem was solved.”
But, Adam, as of mid April, this was essentially a brand new internal system drive. We took one o my three internal Samsung 1TB drives (new in October) reformatted it and created a separate system system drive just for FCP. Fresh install of everything on it. I have the original system drive for my day-to-day use with the bulk of my other apps.
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.2
Quicktime 7.6.6
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20 -
“1) Having many disks hanging off your computer is not the best working practice.”
OK, but how do I handle nearly 7 TB of media internally? And keep in mind, none of them are daisy-chained.
“2) Why did you use Softraid?”
Have to talk to my tech and get back to you on that.
“You can make a RAID0 out of 3 drives in your Mac without extra software.”
A couple of the drives are formatted using SoftRAID, but nothing is currently RAIDed (is that a verb?)
“3) My advice, pull all disks out, put a fresh drive into the MacPro, do a new install of the OS, do all the updates then install FCP and do all of the updates. Add another disk, format it as unjournaled and make this your capture scratch disk. Does FCP run OK now?
If it does, add more hardware bit by bit until you hit a problem.”
We may do just that, Peter, but this is in fact all a fresh install. I’m just trying to find a way to get this job back up as quickly as possible. And I’m prepared to spend money; I’m just tired of buying things conjecturally.
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.2
Quicktime 7.6.6
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20 -
“Taking a look at those logs I would say ram problem. A lot of malloc (memory allocation) calls failing. Can you test them? “
We did run Memtest. Everything came up solid. Any reason to think we need further testing? What would you use?
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.1
Color 1.5.1
Quicktime 7.6.4
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20 -
You took some steps I haven’t tried, Fox. The problem still happens occasionally. I’ll try this the next time it comes up. Thanks.
Martin
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.1
Color 1.5.1
Quicktime 7.6.4
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20 -
Ah, you had me so excited there for a moment, Paul. The positioning seems to work for one end of the clip or the other, but, even with keyframing, I don’t seem to be able to make both ends cooperate.
I’ll fiddle some more with that suggestion.
Martin
2 x 2.26 Ghz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
6 GB RAM
OS 10.5.8
FCP 7.0.1
Color 1.5.1
Quicktime 7.6.4
Avid Media Composer 4.0.2.20