[Martin Phillips]

Hi Kirk – I’ve had my EX3 since last March. I got my fingers burnt early on with SDHC so won’t touch them now. I think that the investment in a number of Sony SxS cards has been worth it because the little odd problems that I was getting have all stopped since I started to only use SxS. Some others like Craig have had no probs with SDHC so there is no right or wrong to using the adapters. But purely based on my experience with them, they do present an element of risk.

[Martin Phillips]

Bill – check that one of your memory modules isn’t playing up. I had the same recently and found that one of mine was giving ECC Errors. You can check by going to Apple > About this Mac > More Info > Memory (You can see the status). If it is this – just remove the bad module and you should be fine.

Hope you find a way out of this.

Martin.

[Martin Phillips]

Hi Tim – I had a similar situation last June with exactly the same card. Card not readable on the EX3. However, I was able to rescue pretty much all the footage as I found I could mount the card on the Mac using a USB card reader. However there was a corrupt clip (the one which I was recording when I got the error message) which caused the spipnning beach ball whenever I tried to access it. Anyway, after trying a few things I found that XDCAM Transfer got me out of jail (Clip Browser didn’t work). If you can get yours to mount, this might work for you:

In XDCAM Transfer, navigate through the BPAV folders to the mp4 files (and once it sees these), your clips should show up. It worked for me, Also I found that a corrupted clip would play until two thirds way through then gave the spinning beach ball. On restarting XDCAM Transfer and positioning an OUT marker a few secs before this corrupt bit, I was able to salvage the ‘good’ part of the corrupted clip.

Hope this helps – after this experience I decided to only use SxS cards.

Martin

[Martin Phillips]

Hi Christian – sorry to hear about your problem – sounds like you should be ok though.

You should be able to access your clips using XDCAM Transfer – you might have to navigate through the BPAV folders to the mp4 files and once it sees these, you should be able to access the clips. It worked for me, Also I found that a corrupted clip would play until two thirds way through then gave the spinning beach ball. On restarting XDCAM Transfer and positioning an OUT marker a few secs before this, I was able to salvage the good part of the corrupted clip.

Hope this helps – it should get the files into a format readable by FCP, if not restoring the BPAV structure.

Martin

[Martin Phillips]

Well, just to wrap this one up and if anyone else is having similar issues, the problem was caused by a faulty memory module giving ECC errors. Took out the offending one (and its pair) and I can now batch render and work without Kernel panics. Replacement being sent over by Apple UK under warranty.

Thanks for advice.

[Martin Phillips]

Hi Rafael,

Thanks for this. Encouraging that people are seeing this problem less. I was wondering whether these problems were SL related or the fact that I was running FCP6 rather than FCP7.

Will try your suggestion, although I am getting crashes when scrubbing along the timeline too.

So perhaps the days are gone when I could do a batch render whilst I go away for lunch!

[Martin Phillips]

Ok – have been trying various things. The most consistent workaround that I have found is to trash the prefs every 4 renders. This allows me 4 more until it crashes again.

So something is corrupting the preferences somewhere along the line.

On looking through other posts this seems to be quite a common problem with MacPros at the moment and goes back a year or so:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1011917

I think that next time will probably have to digitise straight from HD SDI to DVCPRO HD timeline until a workable solution can be found.

Am I alone here having this problem …. or am I missing something obvious? I’ve used FCP constantly for 8 years and NEVER had this amount of trouble.

[Martin Phillips]

Thanks Jerry –

[Jerry Hofmann] “LHe you mean right?”

It is the LHi card (with the HDMI i/o)

The drivers are the latest (Snow Leopard compatible) ones from AJA and Firmtek.

I’m using Keylight for the Chroma Keying. Great plugin, but I am starting to think that this could be part of the problem too …..

[Martin Phillips]

Yes, I agree you shouldn’t rely on it 100% – I use the histogram to make doubly certain that I’m not overexposing.

I probably stuff too many things in my shooting bag, so that’s probably why a button gets twiddled, or a couple of times I have caught my finger on a button when adjusting the viewfinder angle during shooting.

[Martin Phillips]

Great idea! I have been using some Araven storage trays for keeping barebone sata drives, but they seem to have stopped making them, and now I have a whole lot un-boxed. Any other ideas out there for cheap and easy storage of drives? I don’t have any old Umatics hanging around and the MII cases don’t fit 🙂