Nathan Mcalpine
Forum Replies Created
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Dang, just had it happen on yet another computer. MacBook Pro OSX 10.7.3.
I took a 100GB 1920×1080 ProRes Mov. Opened it in MPEG Streamclip, set in/out and trimmed it. I then set it to encode to a MP4, H.264 video. I left the office at 5PM, came in at 7AM and the progress bar was at 23% and still chugging along. Basically, it was in a loop all night. The progress bar fills and it just starts over.
How come nobody else seems to be having this problem? Does nobody use this software anymore?
~ Nate
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I’ve had this issue on three different computers. One time, it was a co-worker, and I was showing him the program.
I have tried trashing my prefs and that didn’t help. It’s weird because I can export smaller files (under 50MB) fine, but when I get over a couple hundred MBs I get this loop. It’s only with H.264s too.
~ Nate
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I now feel silly I couldn’t do that. I was trying to drag one catalog on top of another catalog, and that wasn’t working. I’ll blame that one on lack of sleep. Thanks for the quick responses!
~ Nate
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Tom, thanks for your input. You brought up several key issues with how we’ve been archiving.
[Tom Goldberg] “First, the CatDV plugin does not deal with spanned tapes aka Multiple Volumes.”
We have been trying to add media from multiple volumes.
[Tom Goldberg] “In order to restore files with CatDV’s plugin, they must already have been restored to the VTAPE by the user first.”
I simply followed the instructions from Matt Stamos on this YouTube video where there is no manual intervention:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ivb251Qgk7U&context=C4e9f2e1ADvjVQa1PpcFNojjn7TSuKP7OCh5n26WcqzYJi9nglF7k=We have been using LTFS but currently are working with a tape that somehow became a .tar format. We have over a TB of “space lost”. What do you make of that?
[Tom Goldberg] “have you contacted our tech support? We can help you through some of these issues. What version is your Cache-A (you should be at v2.1.15)?”
We have contacted tech support. Rolf actually gave us a helpful response today which we haven’t had a chance to test since we’re also having an unrelated archive issue with another company and we’ve been working with that all day. I will give you an update as to if this fixed some of our problems.
It also looks like we have an old version as we’re operating on v2.0.22. I’ll update that and see if that helps. Hopefully we will have time to run some test and devote all of our attention to this so I can give a detailed update by the end of week.
~ Nate
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[Lindsay Simpson] “Forgive my ignorance, but is worker node a feature only accessible if you have a server-based CatDV system?”
The server plays a vital role in our workflow because we have CatDV on ten computers as well as two Web Client licenses. We save all of our catalogs to the server so any of the computers can access them. Worker node, I believe, is only available for server-based systems, as we have it on a Windows server (although all our licenses are on Macs). You can send commands to make proxies through Worker Node from any of our systems.
~ Nate
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[Lindsay Simpson] ”
Nate, you had mentioned looking at file size by hovering over a file in the CacheA UI correct?”You must hover over the file size to get the uncompressed file size (figure 01) I haven’t noticed the media directory being larger at the end of transfer. I’ll watch for that.
[Lindsay Simpson] “Nate, what type of media are you archiving through CatDV? Does your production house convert all media upon return from a shoot out of it’s native format?”
We do sometimes get footage from outside sources that has been transcoded but mostly it’s our native format and we shoot ProRes. We also have some DVCPROHD footage. Coming up we have an XDCam shoot and am contemplating purchasing the MXF option so we can ingest that directly.
~ Nate
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I feel for both of you guys. We’ve had two techs, myself and another, working for the last couple weeks trying to get our archiving system on track. Archiving from CatDV to Cache-A has been a roller-coaster of an experience.
At first things were going very well. The footage would be backed up to LTO and a field in CatDV would auto-fill with the path to where the footage was archived. Our first problem was trying to easily verify that the footage had been successfully backed up. There is no way to compare file size, as Cache-A compresses the files. We did learn that by hovering over a file, it does show you the original size, but it took several days to discover that. You also cannot view the footage from Cache-A, to double check that it’s actually there.
We proceeded with archiving this way for a few hours, then started running into issues. Occasionally, a file would not back up and we would receive an error message that CatDV could not find the path to Cache-A. I would try to reconnect to the Cache-A and it would work for a little while before failing again. Sometimes files will not back up and we receive an error message “Unable to make directory.” We have contacted Cache-A and CatDV and have yet to get a useful response.
I attempted to bring footage back in from after purging some test footage. I got an error message saying Cache-A cannot locate the file. Using the Cache-A web gui, we can locate the files on the LTO, but for whatever reason it is not found when trying to bring back the footage.
Every time we think we’re making progress, something quirky happens. The Cache-A wont mount, error messages pop up. Our most recent issue, we have a 1.5TB LTO. Put 150GB onto it through CatDV and it said we had 1200GB of “space lost” so the tape was full.
So frustrating. I keep waiting for things to just fall into place and work but as of now, it hasn’t happened. I hope things change, because we have a lot of time and money thrown into this and we really want it to work as advertised.
~ Nate
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What did you end up doing Rafael? I am in the same situation right now. I’m working on a project that was shot on the Sony F3. Since all the footage was XDCAM EX 1080p30 I decided to use that for my FCP sequence. Now I’m getting all types of different codecs to incorporate into the timeline. I transcode the new footage to XDCAM. After transcoding the video is 1920×1080 but as soon as I bring it into FCP it shows up as 1440×1080. So frustrating…
~ Nate
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That doesn’t help, since many people need to have write access due to our workflow. It’s not a huge concern, but I would feel safer disabling just the overwrite. It would be too easy for somebody to think they have a filter on, select all, and paste. Then they realize, oops, the filter wasn’t on.
~ Nate
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This creates another problem. If I have 1000 different paths, and I archive these projects, is there a way to make these paths auto-update?
~ Nate
