[Paul Harrill]

Chad –

Sadly, I never resolved the issue. In August, when I last posted, it seemed like it might be a problem with those Hitachi drives in my OWC RAID enclosure. A week or so after switching to WD Caviar Black drives the problem cropped up again. I also did tests of the RAM, tried running off of firewire instead of eSATA, working off of a fresh boot drive, tried working off a fresh FCP install… I never got it to stop dropping frames. I ultimately moved the RAID over to a new iMac and had no problems, so all I was able to conclude there was something wrong with something related to my Mac Pro. Odd, though, as the Mac Pro displayed no other issues.

Kind of sad when Apple’s “top of the line” hardware has such problems, and their iMacs do better. The incident has done nothing to abate my growing skepticism about Apple’s dedication to pro hardware.

PH

[Paul Harrill]

Thanks so much for that info, Doug. Your message, combined another few hours of testing, has me concluding that it’s the Hitachi drives.

I finally took the RAIDs over to another computer (MacMini, running Lion). Though promising at first, I started getting the same messages. Even though the same computer is pushing prores on another FW800 drive just fine. Same specs of footage and everything. So, while I can’t be certain it’s the Hitachi’s I have no other link in the chain to rule out.

To Rafael’s point about unchecking “Warn Next Time” and moving on: While, yes, it’s not a major issue at the moment, I am worried that it could develop into one. I am pushing one track of video and two tracks of audio on this footage. No renders, no effects, nothing else. I feel like if I’m going to drop $1000+ on new drives, there shouldn’t be issues like these. My window for returning the drives is closing, so I need to either return them or accept the the problem. I’m choosing to return them.

[Paul Harrill]

Two other critical pieces of information:

1) I’ve just switched out my backup RAID (identical type of RAID enclosure and identical type drives). Using the same project, I still get the dropped frames. This greatly reduces the chance that there’s something wrong with my enclosure(s) or one of the specific Hitachi drives. If there’s something wrong with the Hitachi’s it’s something about the design/build, not a specific malfunctioning drive.

2) The dropped frames don’t happen every time I try to playback. It happens like every 15 minutes or so. The last three times happened at 1:22pm, 1:57pm, and 2:07pm. I’m almost wondering if it could be that the computer is trying to do something else on an intermittent basis and it creates a hiccup.

I’ve checked Activity Monitor but don’t know enough about system processes to venture a guess. I will say the only new applications I’ve installed in the time between things working and things not working are: 5DtoRGB, and two updates (Slink and Handbrake). None of those applications have been running, however.

[Paul Harrill]

Good questions. Answers below:

[Tom Bucknall] “What kind of media are you working with?
“

I’m working with ProRes (normal, not LT or HQ), transcoded from AVCHD shot by an FS-100. This is newly logged/transferred footage I’m working with, but I believe the settings are identical to footage I’ve been working with for some time… never really had problems like this with it before. (At least nothing that a simple reboot of FCP didn’t fix.)

[Tom Bucknall] “Are you using any kind of I/O card or box, have you tried turning ‘External Video’ in the view menu to Off.
“

No I/O card or box. I do occasionally used Desktop Cinema Preview, but external video being on or off doesn’t seem to make a difference. I’ve had it off and on at different times and the frame dropping has happened either way.

[Tom Bucknall] “Do you have video scopes, audio mixer or the VO tool open?
“

Nope. Nothing.

[Paul Harrill]

Coming a little late to this, but I authored the post that Aindreas posted at the beginning of this thread. I’m glad it was useful for you!

Like many others, I’m going to be doing test runs of Adobe, Avid, etc. in the coming days. I’ll try to post my thoughts on the SRF blog, in case you’re interested.

Paul Harrill
https://www.selfreliantfilm.com

[Paul Harrill]

Interesting. I ended up calling BMD and their tech support person had me try a few different things. The solution ended up being quite simple: I uninstalled the Multibridge software, reinstalled 6.7, then cold booted the Multibridge (i.e., powered down Mac, powered unplugged Multibridge, plugged in Multibridge, powered up Mac). It was, of course, the one thing I hadn’t tried, and it worked.

Things seem to be working now on:

MacPro Quad core
Leopard 10.5.4
Quicktime 7.5.5
Multibridge 6.7