[Mike Parfit]

Hi,

We have similar problems. Timeline is 3 hours long (tiny compared to yours!) but we have 300 hours of footage in bins, and quite a few backup sequences in the browser, and that seems to eat up a lot of memory, though never more than about 1.3 gigs. We have 4 total, but Final Cut can’t see them all. We have a G5 quad with about 4 terrabytes of firewire storage, and it crashes a couple of times a day at least. The crashes do not seem related to the length of the timeline, because I often just have a short sequence open and it still crashes. I think it may be more related to the amount of stuff in the browser, but for me the crashes also occur, though less frequently, on much smaller projects. The crashes do not seem to happen during any one particular activity, but rendering long chunks (more than 10 minutes) is almost always impossible.

We have recently run a long memory test with many passes, with no negative results. At last we’ve managed to get a couple of days in which we don’t need the machine and I’m going to take it into a shop to see if anything’s going on in the hardware. But my suggestion to you is that if it’s anything like what is going on here, this kind of problem seems to get worse with the overall amount of stuff in the bin, not just the length of the timeline. Removing older backup sequences from the browser significantly reduces the size of the project file, but in our case has not seemed to reduce the number of crashes.

Maybe there’s a firewire drive component to it, too. A lot of the people in this forum seem to do very well with their SATA arrays, etc., but when I’ve posted here before I haven’t heard from many firewire drive enthusiasts, that’s for sure. Even though the Kona speed tests that I’ve done have shown excellent read and write numbers, far faster than necessary for the HDV and DV I’m working with, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s something going on with these chained-up things anyway. You know, maybe Final Cut wants some specific bit that’s hanging out on the end of some chain, and there’s a drive out there yawning away from not having been accessed lately, and boom, down it goes.

Good luck,

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

Hi,

I agree with the no sleep rule. However, just for your information, we had the same thing with both an LHe and a Kona 3 in our quad G5. The computer would sleep fine without the cards, but would take off and fly down the hallway if you tried to get it to sleep with a card in it. We also had some significant kernal panic problems at first with the Kona 3. I’m not sure why those crashes have largely gone away.

We tried it for a while and after good consultation with AJA tech support, have used the Kona 3 sleeplessly now for six months with few problems.

Good luck,

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

I have been using USB2 to playback DV and HDV with relatively few problems for basic editing, where occasional dropped frames are not disastrous. The issue with the Seagate is entirely different. I just received this from the Seagate tech support about my external drive:

Seagate External Hard Drives are designed to spin down or go to sleep
after about 5 minutes of inactivity. This is to extend the operation life
of the hard drive. There is no way to disable this feature.

This is the same for either a USB connection or firewire. Setting the computer’s sleep preferences has no impact on this.

This makes these drives impossible to use for playback even in the firewire configuration unless the entire program is on that one disk or it’s shorter than five minutes. I am trying to come up with something in the background to keep the disk running (looping a long soundless itunes clip, or something that just hits the disk for a second every four minutes?) but so far I can only use the thing for archives.

Good luck,

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

Hi,

I am not sure I’m following this correctly, but here is my 1.5 cents worth. We converted a timeline from HDV to DVCProHD by using media manager to recompress in the DVCProHD codec. The timecode went with it, and shows up in the item properties of each clip. As an exercise, we also made a small offline project using the DVCproHD timeline, then used the original disk with the HDV on it to reconnect media, and the timeline reconnected to the HDV just fine.

To test this, I just moved one of DVCProHD clips to an HDV timeline and asked FCP to recapture. It captured perfectly and put the HDV clip in exactly the right place.

I don’t know if this applies to what you’re doing, but it might. It is no doubt better to capture the HDV directly into DVCProHD using a capture card, but this is a way of doing it that has worked for us.

Best wishes,

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

OK, got it. Thanks,

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

Ah, OK, that makes sense. There must be a difference in the codecs, so the Kona DVCPRO HD codec must work faster in a Kona-FCP system than the one that I create just by using FCP to recompress individual files through Quicktime export.

But I see that I could use Media Manager to recompress the HDV into the AJA Kona 3 29.97 DVCPro HD codec. Wouldn’t that solve that issue?

Thanks!

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

Did you capture it native as DVCPro HD or HDV and then use FCP to convert the footage to DVCPro HD? It works much faster when coming in through the Kona card to DVCPro HD.

Hi, Walter,

I’ve read a lot of your posts on this subject and much appreciate them.

We captured in HDV and recompressed when we tried DVCPRO HD. We just didn’t find working in DVCPRO HD that much faster, probably because of the simplicity of our narrative structure. We have a Kona 3 and no more budget for an HD10AVA to let us capture the component analog, so we brought the HDV in through firewire. Under those circumstances, we eventually thought that we’d better keep the project as close to the original as possible. If things turn out really grim for color correction we can either recompress or recapture, but we don’t anticipate that. Does that make sense?

This also allows us to output HDV fairly simply if necessary since we don’t own or have ready access to any other kind of deck. For rough distribution of work-in-progress material where resolution doesn’t matter we just go out of the Kona 3 in composite to an on-the-fly DVD recorder.

Thanks,

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

Hi,

Our situation may be relevant.

We’re doing a long-form documentary on a G5 quad, using HDV and some DV on FCP 5.1. We recompressed to DVCPRO HD and tried that for a while, but eventually did not see huge time savings, and were concerned about the recompression issues. We have gone back to editing directly in HDV. It does not seem too difficult. We do not have many effects, so that probably helps. It seems to make sense to have as few recompressions as possible from the original.

To output to HDV from the HDV timeline just requires several hours of conforming and then straightforward output through firewire to the deck. We have done that several times to show HDV rough cuts. However, when we output later we’ll probably rent an HDCAM deck and go to it through the Kona card.

Does that help at all?

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

Many thanks!

Dumped the filter and it seems to have worked. I’ll just stick the filter back in if I need it.

Thanks, too, for taking the trouble to explain in detail how to remove the filter. I wouldn’t have known.

I’m also planning to recompress the project to DVCPRO HD, which doesn’t appear to have the same problem.

Many thanks for all the responses. I hope this gets fixed soon.

Mike

[Mike Parfit]

Thanks for the responses.

I am using 60i HDV.

When I remove the Kona 3 from the FCP process by changing the Audio/Video Settings so that Video Playback shows “None”, I can usually get the multiclip to work in real time. Yes, it eventually needs rendering to get a final product, but at least I can edit it.

Here’s how it works: In the browser, none of the angles that go into the multiclip have the shift fields filter installed. I put the multiclip together, then put it on the timeline. Now all the angles have the shift fields filter. The timeline goes to red and requires rendering.

I then remove the shift fields filter from each of the angles of the multiclip. The red line goes away. I then start to edit, switching between angles using the Viewer, as I have always done. But each time I cut between angles, FCP automatically reinserts the shift fields filter on the angle that I have chosen. The timeline goes back to red and the screen only shows the unrendered media message.

It seems very buglike to me that FCP puts the shift fields filter on every clip every time it is placed on the timeline ONLY when FCP is outputting to the Kona 3. If it were putting the shift fields filter on accurately that would be another matter, but in fact the shift fields filter changes the dominant field to the opposite of what the sequence settings say it should be, thus forcing a render.

Thanks for any advice.

Mike