Forum Replies Created

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  • Neil Sadwelkar

    December 30, 2024 at 2:16 pm in reply to: Can’t open old FCP libraries.

    From the last modified date of these libraries you could guess the version of FCP X that these were saved to. Versions of FCP X by date released, are listed in the Wikipedia page for ‘Final Cut Pro’. Scroll to the bottom to see the table with versions and release dates.

    For eg. if the Library was last modified in 2016, then its likely to be FCP X 10.3 or earlier.

    To get FCP 10.3 you’ll have to find an old Mac with MacOS 10.12 installed. In that Mac, you can login with your App Store credentials and in the App Store go to ‘Purchased’ to find your purchase of FCP X. In that system, since its still on MacOS 10.12, the App Store should offer you FCP x 10.3 of 10.4 for download.

    If this works and you get FCP X 10.4, the you should be able to open a 10.4 or earlier Library. It may ask to update in case the Library is even older.

    But you may not even need to go so far back. You could can start with the previous version of FCP X, that is FCP X 10.7 or 10.6 which will be available on an older Mac Intel system. 10.7 or 10.6 may be able to open many older 10.x version libraries. So, you may need to open and upgrade these libraries in successively newer FCP versions and upgrade them in stages till 10.6 or 10.7. Once you reach there, then the latest FCP should be able to upgrade them.

    This looks to be a long and tedious run.

    Neil Sadwelkar

  • I don’t have experience with this specific NAS, but I’ve deployed 5 systems on a QNAP NAS, with 3 on 10GigE and 2 on 1 GigE. My systems are Prem Pro and Avid, and one Prem Pro is on 10GigE, the other 1 GigE. These are used for feature and series edits. All the media is either DNxHD 36 for Avid, or Apple ProRes LT or Proxy for Prem Pro. All either 1080p24 or 1080p25. (24 is 24.000, not 23.976, as we are in a PAL country). No raw files, no 4k files.

    What I’ve done with the Prem Pro systems, is, to provide each of them with a 2TB USB SSD and set that as preview and cache from within Prem Pro. So that at project open time, the system doesn’t read from NAS for media and write back for cache/preview to NAS. This is one thing you could consider. Preventing large number of simultaneous read-writes to NAS over 1 GigE.

    Also, our project files are not stored on NAS, but locally and then backed up to the NAS every night.

    Second, if at all possible, as a trial, transfer some or all of the the slow-to-open media from NAS, to a fast hard drive RAID or SSD, then, after reconnecting to that media in PPro, unmount the NAS, and check if project open is faster. With media local.

    Basically, by the process of elimination you will need to ascertain whether, your system is slow (probably not), or is the NAS throughput and latency not adequate, or is 1 GigE not high bandwidth enough. Or is there some other issue.

    Neil

  • Neil Sadwelkar

    May 2, 2024 at 10:32 am in reply to: I scratch your back, you scratch mine

    Santanu,

    Ever growing archives of media, is an issue facing any content creator. 70TB is what a feature or series generates in about 40 days of shoot, so it’s not a huge amount in today’s standards.

    The most common method of archive is backup to LTO. I do a lot of this. Like over a petabyte in a year. Every year since the past 7+ years. Like almost any ‘on-prem’ archive, this one is not a ‘forever archive’. LTO tapes change generations every couple of years, and while backward compatibility is assured within about 1-2 generations, after about 10 years, one needs to ‘migrate’ entire LTO tape archives to the current generation. For example, I’m migrating large collections of LTO-5 and 6 tapes created in the 2012-15 period, to LTO-8 and LTO-9 tapes now. 10 years from now, they’ll need to migrate again.

    If archives are stored on hard drives, those too have a life, and even hard drive based archives need to be migrated to the current largest capacity drives. I’ve migrated many 2-4TB drives from 2009-2012 to 8-12TB drives around 2017-2020. Some of the original 2-4TB drives still work, some don’t. But the dupes made in 2017-2020 are still readable, but not for long. So, I’ll need to migrate them once again, next year.

    A convenient aspect of migrating is that hard drive prices halve every 2-4 years, and capacity also doubles in about that time. So also, LTO generations. Each LTR generation stores 1.5x-2x of the previous generation.

    Cloud archive has a monthly cost which varies depending on which platform one chooses. People who archived to the cloud in the 2018 or before, have now paid for about 5+ years. And they continue to pay huge sums of money to keep this data in the cloud. The amount of data they have in the cloud is so huge now that taking it back is impractical, due to the time, and egress costs. So, most likely, some will keep their local copy and delete the cloud backup eventually.

    I get many queries from people paying hundreds of thousands of $ per annum just to keep their data in the cloud. They ask, can we not own a setup and keep this ourselves, maybe in another premises in some other part of the city or some other city. This is the new ‘private cloud’, which I’m devising for some of my clients. With the advantage that if any data was needed, all one has to do is connect a drive and copy it. No egress time, no egress charges.

    Neil

  • Neil Sadwelkar

    February 10, 2024 at 5:13 pm in reply to: bru tape import tool and bru pe

    Are you sure the Bru-PE version is 18.1.1? As far as I remember the last version was 3.x

    In general, Bru-PE could import archives from older versions, but not from newer ones. Maybe the tape is from an Argest setup? Arrest is the successor of Bru-PE.

  • Neil Sadwelkar

    December 21, 2023 at 3:04 am in reply to: Best 2-4TB SSD with FCPX, Crucial X9 or X9 pro?

    The recent spate of failures were with Sandisk Extreme Pro 4TB version.

    Samsung 3TB I haven’t heard of such a drive. There’s 2TB and there’s 4TB. But I haven’t come across reports of Samsung 2TB or 4TB drives failing.

    In early 2023, there were reports of the Samsung 980 Pro 2TB NVMe SSD having failures but there was a firmware fix that Samsung issued which seemed to fix the problem.

  • Neil Sadwelkar

    December 19, 2023 at 4:41 am in reply to: Best 2-4TB SSD with FCPX, Crucial X9 or X9 pro?

    There are many SSDs on the market now. But only a few are suited for video post.

    Almost all SSDs are faster than hard drives as far as reading data is concerned. But not many SSDs are fast for writing large amounts of data. Most SSDs write data very fast up to about 50-100 GB and then slow down to less then hard drive speeds. This is a on board RAM/Cache thing in the SSD. But there are also SSDs which write even 800GB to several TB, very fast.

    Also, the new M1/M2/M3 series Macs are somehow slower for reading/writing to USB SSDs as compared to the same USB SSD with an older Intel Mac. Thunderbolt SSDs work fine on M1/M2/M3 Macs. Or, connecting USB SSDs via a Thunderbolt 4 hub seems to improve their speed on an M1 Mac.

    From experience, Samsung Shield 4TB works very well on M1 Macs. Use the cable that came with the SSD. With Macs using a wrong cable will give you USB 2.0 speeds on SSDs. Maybe that’s what’s happening in the screenshot you uploaded (maybe, it could also be a bad SSD).

    But what’s really worked for me is to get OWC Envoy express or Sabrent Thunderbolt SSD enclosures and placing an NVMe SSD inside it. That’s seriously fast and can actually speed up your renders.

    WD Black, Samsung 980/990 Pro, Samsung 970 Evo Plus, Crucial P5 Plus, are NVMe SSD models that I’ve found are very fast (inside the above enclosures) even for sustained writes and reads. I’ve used mine extensively with DaVinci Resolve Studio, so I’m sure they’ll work fine for FCP.

  • Neil Sadwelkar

    October 5, 2023 at 2:05 pm in reply to: Davinci Resolve 18 – automated in/out points

    ‘X’ marks just the clip that your cursor is parked at.

    Neil

  • Neil Sadwelkar

    October 5, 2023 at 1:49 pm in reply to: Imagine Products PreRoll Post database errors

    I had this issue many years ago. But that was with just a handful of tapes. I had written to Imagine then, and they sent a new build which helped me retrieve those tapes.

    But it was too scary. So, after retrieving the tapes I switched to YoYotta and more recently to Canister and their backups are more reliable.

    Neil

  • The performance of external USB drives on M1/M2 Macs has been posted about before.

    There is a reduction in R/W speeds for USB drives on M1/M2 Macs compared to Intel Macs. It’s to do with USB 3.1 Gen 2 compatibility in the M1/M2 Macs. This issue was more pronounced in older M1 based MacBooks but has improved somewhat with newer M2 Max and M2 Ultra Macs. But still not as fast as the same drive on an Intel Mac.

    On solution that some propose is to use a Thunderbolt hub between the Mac and the USB drives. There are some YouTube videos demonstrating this. But the improvement is marginal to substantial depending on the drive and cable. Its too unpredictable.

    I now use only Thunderbolt external drives with my M1/M2 MacBook Pros and Mac Studios. They cost a bit more but they work well.

    Neil

  • Neil Sadwelkar

    October 5, 2023 at 1:38 pm in reply to: Cannot import a… .mp4 file in Davinci

    Are you using DaVinci Resolve free or DaVinci Resolve Studio.

    Resolve Free cannot import certain types of MP4 files. Specifically 10-bit MP4 files from a Sony A7s3.

    These 10-bit MP4 files import in Resolve Studio.

    Neil

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