[Michael Peele]

Thanks for the helpful hints everyone!
Mike

[Michael Peele]

Well,
If you want to do HD, you would definately want two U320 SCSI arrays or two (maybe one) Fibre Channel arrays. SCSI has a cost/GB benefit right now, but is (for the most part) strictly a one user solution.
Fibre Channel allows for centralized storage and allows for multiple users to access the same storage (similar to network attached storage).
Either solution can begin with one array for SD work and a second could be added later for HD or just more storage.
With the way storage prices fall, if you are just doing DV or SD work for now, I would just do a FW800 RAID for now. Buy your expensive HD storage when you buy your HD camera and deck. You’ll get more storagre and more speed for less $$$ then.
Mike

[Michael Peele]

Make sure this menu item is turned on:

View->External Video->All Frames

or you can hit Apple+F12

Make sure your deck/camera is on when starting FCP.
Make sure your Video Playback setup is correct in Audio/Video Settings.

Mike

[Michael Peele]

Why involve Avid DV Express at all? I assume it is to be able to connect to it’s analog inputs.

Have it transfered to DV and capture using FCP and your DV camera/deck. This solution is easy, should be low cost (especially if you do it yourself), and allows you to have deck control and timecode, providing a path for redigitizing.

-or-

Use a DV deck (DSR-45 works well) connect outputs of BetaSP to DSR-45, set DSR-45 input to Component (or S-Video) and do capture nows in FCP. This solution is done without deck control and no timecode, so there is no easy redigitizing. Most current DV cameras and decks are capable of this setup (Analog in DV out).

Have fun,
Mike

[Michael Peele]

I really doubt if this a brand issue. I’ve seen every drive brand fail. I have seen every brand last well beyond warranty (I still have a 75GB 5 platter from IBM’s Hungary plant – notorious for failure). I have seen bad “lots” of drives from almost every manufacturer. The biggest upgrade in reliability I have seen is fluid dynamic bearings. That being said, if you hear weird noises coming from the drive (loud/repetative clicks/cycles of clicks), it’s a dead man walking.

Try this:
When you reformatted, I assume you picked HFS+ without journaling (although I have had no issues with journalled drives myself). You may want to set it to write all zeros – takes longer, but should map out all bad sectors.
You may want to set partitions to something other than 1 partition, then repartition back to 1 partition (assuming you want 1 partition).
This may just be some voodoo, but something feels good about knowing a new partition map has been written. I have still never gotten a clear answer if reformatting does this if you are using the same partition.

Ok, if that didn’t work, try switching some of your HD slave/master jumpers around.
Try making both drives cable select.
Try making system drive master and secondary drive slave.

BTW – you do have the secondary drive on the same cable as your system, right? If it is connected in line with the Optical, you will have problems generally. If it is connected to a PCI-ATA card, I would update that cards firmware. If that doesn’t help, connect it to the system drive.

Good luck,
mike

[Michael Peele]

Well, my line of thinking on extruding an alpha channel was contingent on a pretty well defined alpha channel – you know standard logo on a transparent background. I know that in Boris, if you have an illustrator .eps, you can extrude the edges to create a simple 3d shape, which can then be tumbled/rotated/etc.

Well unfortunately, customers usually don’t have their logos done in illustrator, or at least they don’t have a copy of the illustrator logo. Often enough I am cleaning up a scanned letterhead, grabbing from the internet, or some other mickey-mouse way of getting the logo into photoshop. But even then I end up with no paths or vector artwork, just pixels.

So here I am, trying to just get some depth based on a clean alpha edge, and I think Andy Mees may be right – AE is the only way to do it. Boris wants an .eps, FCP has no built in solution, and I have seen no plug-in that seems to help.

Thanks for the replys,
Mike

[Michael Peele]

What type of video are you working with?
If you are just doing DV, which has a whopping data rate of ~3.5MB/sec, a single FW800 drive should be able to support enough tracks of video that you will be forced to render before you max out the drives’ bandwidth.

Striping drives carries with it certain risks – like twice the chance of failure leading to complete data loss – with each additional drive added to a volume, you add another chance of failure. With a four drive stripe you are four times as likely to have a drive die, and if a drive dies that is part of a striped volume, all the data in that volume is gone. Typically, volume and filesystem repairs are more difficult on striped drives as well.

That being said, drives seem to have become a little more reliable as of late, and OS X plus HFS+ seem to be playing very well with each other, resulting in less volume and filesystem errors than a few years ago.

Again, IF this is DV, I would suggest sticking with single drive solutions. If you are dropping frames, consider moving the drives to a firewire bus that is fully independent from the camera/deck firewire bus – i.e. get a FW800 card.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a really fast disk array as well, but unless the situation demands it, I avoid striping.
Mike

[Michael Peele]

Tom – you are right – it’s not an absolute thing – just sometimes, some cameras. I think DVCAM is a little better at maintaining sync. Oh yeah, and in reference to capture settings, you should make sure that your camera is set to 2ch/16bit/48KHz audio, not 4ch/12bit/32KHz. AFAIK, if your tape is 32KHz, and your timeline is 48KHz, you are forcing FCP to do a realtime sample rate conversion, which probably doesn’t help things…
Mike

[Michael Peele]

Are you looking for SCSI or Fibre solution?
Try medea.com or hugesystems.com
They carry both.

[Michael Peele]

The fact that the clips won’t play back happily from QT is troubling. Does a normal, non-batch capture result in the same issues? Have you tried trashing not only your FCP preferences, but your QT preferences as well? You may also want to try starting a new project, making absolutly sure that the capture settings are correct and bring your logged, off-line clips into that project. Running a disk tool (techtool, diskwarrior) on your capture drive might not be a bad idea either.
Good luck,
Mike