Lock-Up on Capture! PLEASE HELP

First let me say that you guys have gotten me out of sooo many pickles in the past it's crazy. SO THANK YOU!
This is my setup: G4 dual 1.25, 2gig, OS 10.3.9, FCP 4.5, Seritel 1VE4 SATA controller w/ 4 bay tower, 4x 250 gig Western Digital SATA drives, KONA LS
I know that it's old but I don't kill myself on side projects. I recently switched to KONA from an Aurora Igniter Studio card and that's when this problem arose. I cannot capture more that 4 minutes of video and my SATA raid locks up. It doesn't lock my computer, just the raid tower. The capture window freezes. I am capturing 10-bit uncompressed SD via a Sony DSR-1500a. I could capture for days with my old Aurora card with no problems, but that card went South and so did Aurora so Kona was my only option for this machine. Man, everything is up to date...firmware-wise. I didn't upgrade my OS because Aurora stopped making drivers and everything was running perfectly. What do you guys think?

I didnt know the Aurora even supported 10.3.9. Is that card still in your Mac? Can you pull it and put the Kona in its place?

Michael Horton
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Thanks for the reply Michael. No, the Igniter card is out and I installed the Kona card where it was and did a complete clean re-install of everything. The Kona was in Slot 4 and the seritek was in slot 2. After trying to fix this issue, I switched slots to see if that was the problem. Now the Kona is in slot 2 and the seritek is in slot 4.

Guess the next question is how much space you got left in your Raid?

Michael Horton
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931 gigs. I cleared the drives and reformatted. Whenever the raid locks up during capture, I have to reboot the system. I go and check my disk space and there is only 1.95 gigs available. So I have to dump a 3-4 minute capture file that is 929 gigs or so. It has an "av" in the file name.

Hey Michael, when I did my clean install of my OS and all software, I updated Quicktime to the current. Do you think this could be a Quicktime issue? I am still on OS 10.3.9, but I have a much newer Quicktime version. I was going to upgrade my OS now that I don't have the Igniter card.

4 minutes of 10 bit uncompressed SD comes in at 931 GBs? That aint right. What media we talking about here? What cam did it come from?

Michael Horton
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HAHAHA! No, this is footage shot on my DVX100a. Since I am still on 10.3.9, could the most current Quicktime driver be conflicting with my version of OS? Talking with you has made me think of that.

I am capturing from a Sony DSR1500a via component, for what it's worth.

Hey Michael, let me explain the "av" file. When I name my clip and then hit capture, itbegins to capture for a few minutes and then locks up my RAID, right? Then after I reboot, I open my scratch folder to view the file captured file. The file is named whatever I named it and the at the end it has a ".av". So if i named it "Pork and Beans" it would actually show up as "Pork and Beans.av" and it would be a 930 gig file. It's crazy!

Have you already ruled out one of the most common causes? Limit Capture Now is not checked, or set to a very high number, so all Capture Now clips hog an obscene amount of drive space before they're even done capturing.


www.derekmok.com

Hey Derek, Yes that was one of the first things that I looked at. I must've been through my settings a million times.

Okay guys, here is a revelation! I came home from work to see if I could capture to an INTERNAL drive. After 3 minutes of capture...the capture window froze. I forced quit FCP and tried to immediately open that drive to access the file...When I try to open the capture scratch folder, I got the beachball. For some reason, my system does not like these files. I'm happy that my RAID is ruled out though. I'm wondering if I upgrade my OS maybe that will solve this issue. On my way home I stopped off and bought 10.5. Dare I?

Sorry to get back to you so late. Have you tried capturing via Firewire? No real need to capture this DV into Final Cut at 10bit uncompressed. Some will argue with me but I don't get it.

Michael Horton
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Oddly enough, I did try that but no luck...same thing. The only reason that I don't use firewire is the "preparing video for viewing" or whatever it says. It really slows my workflow, believe it or not. I am going to upgrade my OS and see if that helps...it can't hurt at this point.

The only thing I can think of is the Raid is not properly formated. Did you format as Mac OS extended? Course that would not explain the internal drive unless that was not properly formatted either.

Michael Horton
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I've also seen one case before where a media file had some sort of code written into it that, when you attempt to resave it, it would blow up into a giant file that ate up all your space. I could only guess it was some sort of duplication protection. I don't know why a capture attempt might result in a file like this, though.

> No real need to capture this DV into Final Cut at 10bit uncompressed. Some will argue with me
> but I don't get it.

I'd vouch for that. You're capturing DV as Uncompressed 10-bit -- five times the file sizes with zero benefits; your footage will not look better. FireWire capture also shouldn't have this "Preparing for viewing" issue you're talking about. Something else is fishy.

Try disconnecting the RAID entirely, then capturing to the internal drive. Do not do upgrades yet -- in many cases they can compound a problem rather than fixing it.


www.derekmok.com

Yes, I have cleared and re-formatted as OS extended. Man, you guys are great for sticking with me on this deal.

Ya know since you've been fiddling with settings an cables so much its time to trash prefs and try FW capture once again.

I do know that 1500 machine can cause all sorts of problems and why I don't know. And yes, it can be a QT problem. Hell, its almost always a QT problem.

Michael Horton
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I will dive into this more when I get home from work tonight. I will try that again Michael. Thanks again you guys. I really appreciate your help.

Okay guys, I think I fixed my problem. Michael, you said that since I had messed with cables and booted my system so many times that I should trash pref's and stuff. Well I took it a bit further. I completely started from scratch by re-installing my OS and drivers and software. This time I just used the quicktime version that came on my OS disk, which I don't think was even version 7, but I'm not sure. After all of that I re-set all of my settings and tried to capture 8-bit uncompressed. I started dropping frames like crazy, BUT nothing locked. I then went and updated quicktime to version 7.0.4, went back and tried capture again...Worked great! Now I'm back up to 10.3.9 using Quicktime 7.0.4 and seems all is okay, knock on wood. So there you go. Thank you guys for helping me out and staying with it.