Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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I understand that, but not every Multibridge has the problem where you can’t update the firmware. You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you think you’ll never need to update it. I’d RMA it immediately. If Blackmagic releases 1.6 and that allows loop-through capability, how exactly are you going to take advantage, if you can’t even run the update?
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If your Multibridge cannot be updated, you should RMA it.
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Unlike most software, the manuals that come with Final Cut are excellent and very readable.
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It’s very important not to lose the ability to batch capture later on. Like Matte said, make a new copy of the tape with new, continuous timecode. Do a deck to deck Firewire transfer. Or, if you only have one deck, change the FCP settings to “Ignore Timecode Breaks.” Then capture an entire time and then create new tapes from the captured files using new TC. And then capture from the new tapes and edit those.
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Which ATI are you talking about? The ATI X800 is more powerful than the Nvidia 6800, which in turn is more powerful than the ATI 9800.
Sean
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Let me rephrase that one part (I hate how you can’t edit posts in an editors forum).
The support guy at Firmtek knows that their Seritek cards and his driver is the only working external SATA solution for Maxtor drives on a Mac. So because of this, he seemed a bit egotistical about it and felt little responsibility in helping with my problem (since his was the only game in town).
Sean
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First off, try lowering your block size. Make it 64k. If that doesn’t work, return the drives and get another brand. These Maxtor SATA drives are crap. That’s the simplest way I can put it. I guess they have extremely sensitive timing.
At our place, we have all Maxtor with Firmtek cards. Two systems use a 4 disk array (like yours) and one uses an 8 disk. Everything is fine now after getting the latest revision models, but it wasn’t always the case. The tech support guy at Firmtek knows a lot about these. Unfortunately, he’s a bit insecure and way to “rah-rah” over his cards. The reality is that the Firmtek cards don’t work well with the older revision Maxtors (300Gb models) and cause issues when in a software RAID.
One editor here had constant unexplained crashes and dropped frames. His array didn’t even mount most of the time when he powered on his G5. He had that Firmtek external enclosure, and the cables it came with – and yet the Firmtek support guy was still convinced that it was our fault somehow because his card is the ONLY one in existence that worked with Maxtors in an external SATA setup. He’s actually right about that because the Sonnet cards we used previously don’t work at all and that was a much, much bigger headache for me.
Of the 16 Maxtors we’re using, 8 of them had to gradually be replaced because they were an older revision. I use them now as signle drives for backups and stuff (and that works just fine). But hours upon hours of this voodoo mystery would have been avoided if I had went with any other brand of hard drive (except Hitachi which also is supposed to have problems).
I know you said yours are brand new, but they could have sat on a store shelf for a long time. I would send them back pronto. Go with Western Digital or Seagate.
Sean
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I use DV50 for a lot of things. I’m talking about a lossless codec, which DV50 is definately not.
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Thanks! Glad to hear it.
Sean
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Respectfully I have to ask, am I speaking to deaf ears?
I got a hold of a DVCPro HD deck and plugged the component HD analog into the multibridge. When I do this, I can indeed embed all 8 tracks.
So it appears that if the Multibridge is in “SD mode”, then it will only embed 4 channels. I must be in “HD Mode” to embed more. Needless to say, this is a problem for me and this limitation was never mentioned anywhere. Hopefully it’s an overlooked bug that can be worked out. I do a lot of jobs where I need to capture video from a Digibeta and have my DA88 chasing the timecode so that I can grab video plus 8 channels at the same time.
These are not wedding jobs. Digibeta + DA88 is what the home video department of a major studio sends us all the time. Being able to capture everything in one pass is one of the major reasons we bought a Multibridge and upgraded to FCP 5.