[Oren Hercz]

Hi,

Thanks Jeremy. I’ve read several of your posts regarding FCPX and SANs. So I guess XSAN is the way to go then for X so you can use the add SAN location feature as opposed to workarounds with disk images.

For your Ethernet SAN, do you have Project and Event libraries on the SAN? Is anything stored locally? And it still plays back snappy?

Thanks,

Oren

[Oren Hercz]

Thanks, that makes sense, only some of my projects are hundreds of gigs so they take a while to transfer. I’ll need to get me some Thunderbolt drives I guess!

I’ll have to try copying the “currentversion” file to see if it will connect up with the media, but I suspect this may cause problems. . .

[Oren Hercz]

Hey thanks,

That wasn’t the problem, but it gave me the idea of what was. I was viewing “all clips,” but I had a filter applied from the event search bar. It’s pretty easy to miss, though, because all you see in the search bar is a little dark “key” logo!

Thanks again,
Oren

[Oren Hercz]

Hey Joseph,

Funny you should write this this morning, as I just got out of a team meeting where we are talking about how much work is coming down the pipes and how it will affect our workflow. Basically, we have a lot of stuff coming in, and more and more we are continually re-purposing old footage, so it looks like we will need some kind of Digital Asset Management solution (maybe CATDV) soon, and definitely will need some kind of large RAID, maybe networked, for allow for more editors.

And it’s my job to figure out how to make all this work! I’ve been eyeing FCPX for a while now. I really like the looks of it, but was nervous about the jump. I really don’t want to switch to AVID or Adobe, but all the Apple fear mongering (you know, all they care about is iphones, not us professionals, boo hoo. . . ) has gotten to me so I’ve been really hesitant.

I’d love to get FCPX, Thunderbolt, maybe CATDV, and a killer RAID to plug into, but this will be a huge investment in a particular workflow that is pretty untested. I’m going to need whatever it is to work. . .!

Interesting times. What do you think? Does FCPX have a future for professionals beyond the one person shop? Do you know of any small to medium sized production houses that have adopted FCPX?

The MacPro question is another thing that makes me wonder. . .

Okay, now we are really off topic (but not really)!!!

Cheers!

Oren

[Oren Hercz]

Thanks Joseph,

Yes, please send your tutorial. oren@journeymanfilm.com

Thanks!
Oren

[Oren Hercz]

Hi Joseph,

Thanks for the input. I agree, my system is a bit of a Frankensystem at times. I’ve got the internal striped RAID, but then sometimes I’m also drawing media off a stock footage drive which is just a bare 7200 RPM drive plugged into an ESATA dock (I have an ESATA PCIe card).

I did a RAM test using Apple Hardware Utility, so all the hardware seems to be working fine.

I’ve been thinking about getting a proper external RAID array. Can you recommend? I want to get something that could support (or connect to) networked attached storage down the line as it looks like things are heading in that direction for our company.

The reason I haven’t thought about this in the past is that we edit in Apple Prores 422, not HQ, so even Firewire 800 should have plenty of bandwidth to accomodate, even without RAIDED drives.

Problem is, only way to test this is to invest a lot of money in new drives and see if things fare better. That’s an expensive experiment!

One more thing, the problem seems to occur when I hit green render bars, at least at first. Does that give any more clues?

Cheers,
Oren

[Oren Hercz]

Hi folks,

Remember me? I know it’s been a little while. Happy New Year everyone.

I wanted to continue this discussion about the problem I was having. It hasn’t gone away, despite me doing most of the suggestions above.

So I’m wondering now if it is something to do with how my system is set-up. Can I give you my specs and you let me know if anything seems amiss? The problem only surfaced when I started editing 1080p Prores 422 material regularly. 720p still plays back no problem, so I’m thinking now that this may have always been a latent problem in the system. Again, problem is–on a fresh restart timeline plays fine, but after a couple of hours (especially if Motion, Mail, Firefox, etc. have been in use as well), it starts to stutter regularly, dropping frames, and putting audio out of sync. The problem usually starts when going a over a dark green or bright green render bar, but once it starts it persists on segments that have been fully rendered. Only way to solve it is to restart.

So this is my system:

Computer:
Apple Mac Pro (8-core Xeon 5400 Series) 2nd Gen. Early 2008 Desktop/PC
RAM: 10GB
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB

Media Drives:
Either:
2 1.5TB drive internal striped RAID set (total capacity 3TB), or,
External GRAID 2 1TB drive from GTECH, through Firewire 800.

Output Box:
Matrox MXO2 feeding HP Dreamcolor through HDMI

OS:
Snow Leopard 10.6.8

Everything has been updated to its most current version. Drives have all been defragged, permissions checked, FCP preferences trashed, etc. Regarding the FCP repair tools, I wasn’t sure which were useful to my situation aside from the trashing preferences one which I did.

The only other thing I’ll mention is that the system does crash more often than I would like. Often, I’ll experience the problem, then shut down. On restart, after log-in I get the scary transparent gray screen that says I need to hold down the power button and restart my computer. I’ll do this and then everything will be fine.

Any help would be much appreciated. I’m tempted to reload the whole system onto a new boot drive, but I don’t want to do all that work only to experience the problem again!

Thoughts? Thanks again!

Oren

[Oren Hercz]

Hi Scott,

Did you ever solve this issue? I’m in the same boat. No more slightly pixelated text! It looks great in Motion, even on my broadcast monitor, then slightly pixelated in FCP, no matter what settings.

What gives?

[Oren Hercz]

Thanks David,

Actually, I did do a clean install of Snow Leopard thanks to the good advice of yourself and others on the forums so that I could avoid issues like this!

Hopefully, that means resolving the issue will be easier.

Cheers,
Oren

[Oren Hercz]

Thank you for the tips Joseph and Steve,

I will try out all these suggestions and see if I can get to the bottom of it.

Cheers,
Oren