[Tom Matthies]

I’ve had this happen a couple of times in the past few weeks. Somehow, something in the project is getting corrupted. I’ve recovered from this by calling up the last, good, autosaved version and going from there. It will then allow you to save that version. I’ve been working with .PSD files each time the problem has occured.

In a post below, within the last week or two there was a suggestion for increasing the memory allocation to the still cache as a solution to the bug. I tried it, and haven’t had the problem since. Just lucky? Maybe…but it might be worth a try, anyhow.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

And…
The audio two-pop in the countdown will help defeat a system with audomatic gain on it’s audio input. I always put a two-pop on my countdowns at a few db more than the tone on the colorbars. This will prevent the automatic gain on a system from bringing up the noise floor on the otherwise silent slate/countdown. A good, robust two-pop will drive the automatic gain circuits back down where they belong and prevent the first second or two of audio on the spot from being over driven my the system when it ingests the spot.
Tom

PS-I always put a 5 second, academy-type countdown on my spots. No real reason…I’ve just always done it that way for many years. Old school… The classics never go out of style. And nobody actually looks at the countdowns anyway except the agency people and the technical folks ingesting the spots.

[Tom Matthies]

Hi Chris…
I had a Maxtor fail about a year ago and what a mess. It had all of my project files on it and no backup…of course.
I sent it to to DriveSavers (800-440-1904) and they made a valiant effort to recover my data. Really nice people to work with. It was going to be a bit pricey, but not really. If they recover the disk, you pay. It not, no charge. Unfortunatly, as Bones might say: “It’s dead, Jim” My drive’s problems sound a lot like yours. This little ticking noise as the heads are seeking across the disk. In my case, my disk was, somehow, so badly damaged that there was nothing that could be recovered. I guess when they go, they go with flair.
Anyhow, you might give them a try.
…and I backup regularly now.

For what it’s worth too, I have six Lacie drives that always have a fan running on them when they are in operation. Those darn things just run too hot! I live up where air conditioning isn’t needed that often. If I come home and the air had been off, anytime the temps go over 80 degrees in the room, the drives act up and start stuttering. Turn on the air, turn on the little cooling fan, wait a half hour or so and all is well again. These things need some more cooling, an internal fan or at least some holes in the case to let the heat out. When they work, they work well. When they don’t, well…
Just my 2

[Tom Matthies]

In NTSC video, no matter whether it’s interlaced or not, you still display one field every 60th of a second. That a field…1/2 the scanlines that make up one half of the frame. If you deinterlace your video, you are basically creating two new FIELDS that are interpolated from the two existing fields. One field fills the even scan lines and the other field fills the odd scan lines. The fields are nearly the same and offset by a single scan line. You do, in fact loose vertical resolution when you deinterlace. The computer tries to “fill in” the missing information when it interpolates the new fields from the two original fields. No matter how you do it, in NTSC, you still have to deal with 2 fields per frame of video. Whether it’s interlaced, with each field slightly different based on movement between frames or deinterlaced with nearly identical, synthesized frames…it’s still going to playback at 60 fields per second.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Thanks for the tip, Mike. That was the problem. I dragged the drive back into the window, and all is well in edit land once again. Hmm, an alias…go figure. I didn’t know that.
Thanks!
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I bought a new G5 a few months ago and had what sounds like a very similar problem. Trouble booting and very unstable when running applications. The problem was tracked down to a bad stick of RAM. It was replaced and I’ve had no problems since.
Just a thought…
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

Thanks. Our graphics guy had done that, but selected the wrong anamorphic preset. When we looked at that menu again, we saw the problem, checked the right preset and all is well. Pilot error on this one. Oops…
Thanks,
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I had a bit of a similar problem the other night. After working on a project for a few hours, I went to save it and got the “unknown volume” error and I wasn’t able to save my project. As far as I know, nothing out of the ordinary happened while I was editing. No crashes or flakyness. It simply wouldn’t allow me to “save” or “save as”. I eventually opened the last autosaved version, got it up to date with the last few edits, and saved it. That version worked fine. I also know thqat I was manually saving all along while editing…just out of habit. This problem must have cropped up after the last time I saved manually.

It’s a little alarming, but I’ve had two instances where this has happened. Once where I couldn’t open a project and once where I couldn’t save it. Both times the autosaved projects saved me. I’m wondering if, somehow, these projects are getting corruped in some way? And, mote importantly, how?
This has only happened twice in a string of about twenty projects, but it’s two times to many in my opinion. The new G5 and FCP 5 have generally been behaving OK, but the problems that have popped up are different from the ones I’ve gotten used to and know the work arounds for.

Anyone have any insights or similar problems?

Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I’ve had the same thing happen. I got around it by opening an autosaved version as well. I could reproduce the problem, everytime, by adding a fade-up transition to a PSD graphic on the top layer. (Doctor, it hurts when I do this… Well, don’t do that.)
Nothing I did would open the original, saved version.
Not a good trend…something’s getting corrupted in there.
Tom

[Tom Matthies]

I’ve han this happen a few times. I found that if you load the offending shot into the viewer and then put it into the timeline again, for whatever reason, it will now be letterboxed. I recently put a 16×9 sequence into a 4×3 sequence and a good number of the scenes didn’t letterbox. Usually they were scenes I had applied a filter to. When I brought them into the timeline, from the original source material and then added the filters again, all was well.
Worth a try anyhow.
Tom