[MacDV] Bizarre Final Cut Pro Problem

[Gregg Gorrie]

on 3/17/04 11:50 AM, animal at animal at cuug.ab.ca wrote:

> Hoping one of you experts can help.
> 
> Using an Emac 10.2.8, older Firewire 120GB hard drive, FCP 4.1, Canon
> XM1 (Like GL1)
> 
> Up until Monday, I had no problem downloading dv to either the Emac or
> a couple older external 120GB firewire hard drives.
> 
> Now - if I download 6 minutes or more to an external, I take the risk
> of having the computer's color wheel spin forever.  What is happening
> is that every so often the 900MB or so clip is downloaded as a 65 - 98
> GB clip and overloads my system.  Each time the external hard drive is
> left with 1.43GB.  I erased this external drive only 7 to 10 days ago,
> and am fairly certain it worked for downloading before Monday.  Then I
> try force quit after force quit which usually but not always works.
> After restart, I then trash the massive clip and start again but waste
> huge amounts of time.  It even happened with a shorter 4 minute clip
> once.
> 
> The Emac seems to run fine otherwise except slower after each of these
> incidents.

By "downloading" to the external drive I assume you're talking about
capturing video to it using FCP, correct? As others have already mentioned,
it could be a drive issue, but there are some other possibilities. Here are
some things to try:

1) Reformat/repair your external FireWire drive, using Apple's Disk Utility.
If you have Disk Warrior and/or Norton's Disk Doctor, check out your disk
with those as well.

2) Try copying some large files from another drive to the suspect drive and
see if you get the lockup - if you do, that suggests a problem with the FW
bridge or hard drive. If you don't have problems with just copying large
files to the drive, try the following:

3) Check your FCP preferences; if you can find them in OSX finder, try
trashing the FCP preferences. There is a setting allowing you to limit your
capture to a certain amount of time (eg. 30 minutes by default). Try turning
this off (or if it is off, check it on and set a realistic time limit for
what you are capturing). Perhaps what is happening is that FCP is allocating
the disk space for whatever time is set, and when the computer locks the
file just expands to fill that space.

4) This is a long shot, but easy to do and often fixes problems that seem to
show up out of nowhere. Zap your P-RAM. Restart your computer and after you
hear the initial chime, hold down the "P-R-option-command" keys at the same
time. Your computer will sound like it is restarting again - hold down those
keys for 3-4 chimes and then let go.

PS: Just reread your posting and it sounds like you're having problems with
more than one external drive. It's unlikely (but not impossible) that both
drives became faulty at the same time, so I would try #3 and #4 above first.

PS PS: How much free drive space have you got left on your System drive?

   
-- 
Gregg