[Stan_dk]

Sara,
We use the XServe RAID with 400GB drives in this suite but we also have Xserve RAID’s in other suites with 250GB and 180GB drives. I was able to test the suite in question with a 250GB drive RAID with no noticeable improvement. I connected the 400GB RAID to another edit suite where we managed to capture a handfull of clips with no timecode breaks and no dropped frames.
I also replaced the Apple fibre channel PCI-X card, the Decklink Pro HD card and all 4 RAM modules to eliminate all potential suspects. This made no difference on this system.
Our local Apple support suggested a possible issue with the Spotlight app and a possibility of indexing of the media files interrupting the capturing process. We dragged the entire RAID voulume into the Privacy window in the Spotlight preferences and this solved the problem. We got through about a dozen of captures on a first take without any aborts or interruptions.
I can’t guarantee this will work for everyone but go ahead and try it as it only takes a few seconds to complete. I initially suspected the RAID but we were able to verify it in our case. Try capturing a short clip to a second internal drive (not the main system drive) if you have one, or an external firewire drive to either eliminate or narrow down the suspected hardware. Let me know whether this worked for you or not.

Bryan,
Can you provide more details of your RAID failure – a dead drive, blown power supply, unable to capture, unable to playback or edit to tape, etc.?
Are your 7 drives striped with RAID 0 or RAID 5? Do you have a spare 250GB drive?

Brent,
What do you capture your media to? An Apple XServe RAID, firewire drive, external SCSI drives?
If you can successfully capture using compression but your system drops frames when using uncompressed settings your drive(s) may not be able to handle the uncompressed stream. Is this your first try with the 8 bit uncompressed settings or have you been able to capture with this setting before?

[Stan_dk]

Hello Sara,
We’ve been experiencing a very similar problem in one of our FCP 5 suites. Some of the media from the Betacam tapes will not capture beyond the 15 second mark. The picture freezes on the desktop and the message about dropped frames or missing timecode pops up on the screen.
This happens with some, but not all, of our Betacam Digital or SP tapes. We’ve been unable so far to determine what is the main reason behind these aborted captures. As far as we can tell the FCP settings should allow to capture the entire clip and generate the warning mesage after the digitizing has completed. So perhaps the dropped frames/missing timecode messages are somewhat misleading as the FCP cannot really determine the nature of the problem. Especially if the FCP is consistently aborting the capture right around the same time mark, give or take a couple of seconds. Dropped frames or missing timecode would be happening more randomly at varying time spots.
We’re running dual 2.5GHz G5 with 2GB RAM, Tiger 10.4.3, FCP 5.0.3, QT 7.0.3, Decklink HD Pro Dual Link with 5.1.2 driver. We work mainly with NTSC SD uncompressed video using either Digital Betacam or Betacam SX machines for capture. All media is captured to the Apple RAID with lots of free space and write rates of around 100 Mb/s as reported by the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.
I believe this problem surfaced up shortly after we’ve upgraded the Mac OS, FCP and the Decklink driver from the previous versions. However, we can successfully capture digital uncompressed media in our other FCP suites running the same configuration. I’m considering either rolling back the Decklink driver to 5.1 version or updating it to 5.2 as a start.
Can you provide some more details of your hardware/software configuration?

Stan D