FCP 6.06 won't let me capture one full uninterrupted hour

I have a live music project recorded in HD (Sony Z1U) 1440x1080i and when I use Capture Now. I did a three camera live music shoot and when I am capturing off my Sony HVR-M5U deck with Firewire 400 (6 foot cable) through my Powerbook Pro OS X with FCP 6.06 to my 2TB Maxtor external HD with 800 firewire (348 G space). I am getting 7 second gaps every two to 26 minutes. I was able to capture one 58 minute piece from my 65 minute tape but all the other tapes are broken up into pieces with approx 7 second gaps between media start and media end in the properties section. Can anyone help or steer me to an article to fix my problem? Is FCP able to capture one hour long unbroken piece of media? TIA

>Powerbook Pro

Are you running a Powerbook or a Macbook Pro? If you are on a Powerbook, I don't think it will work very well with FCP 6.

If you are on a Macbook Pro, your problem could be with broken timecode. Check that your timecode is continuous. If you shot with TOD timecode, you will have to capture them shot by shot.



www.strypesinpost.com

It is indeed a Powerbook but I had the same problem with FCP 5.1 and the cameras were never turned off so the timecode should be all one piece. I did, as mentioned, get one 58 minute piece so it must work somehow/someway. Is it possible to capture 65 minutes at once? Anybody?
thanks

(I have a live music project recorded in HD (Sony Z1U) 1440x1080i and when I use Capture Now I get approx 7 second gaps)

Yes FCP will indeed capture more than 65 mins.

I just finished capturing 4 cameras that recorded almost 3 hrs a piece. With a Mac Book Pro, onto a caldigit VR.

I would double check with your camera operators and make sure they did not turn off the camera not thinking about it when they re framed.

We had to stop using a cam op when we found out that even though they "recorded the whole time" they were turning the record off when there was a break in the action. It was a habit he could not break!

Also, if you drop a single frame in HDV, you can lose around half a second, depending on the size of the GOP. Often you will need to recue around the dropped frame, and lose five or six seconds easily.

HDV sucks. You could try capturing as 'non controllable device', but you will lose timecode reference, so if this is a multicam job, you're just going to have to live with the randomness of HDV deciding to having a little lie down.

I don't need timecode for a reference because I am synching to music so I will try the "non controllable device' and see if it works. How do you recue around dropped frames? thx

The camera operators did not stop tape as I was one of them...

If you're capturing on the correct settings, and your preferences are set up right, FCP should do all the recueing for you and continue with as little loss as possible. In your preferences look for 'abort on capture' and make sure this is set to .. um, what was it.. Im not on FP right now .. somehting like 'make new clip'.

You're on FCP, not FCE right?

If you change your capture settings to Non-controllable device it won't recue, but in theory it won't stop at all, no matter what timecode is doing coming in the the computer.

This is a great forum and I will try all these different remedies. As of now I am fighting with my Maxtor 2TB Raid which has all my media. The controller or something with the hard drives went out as I was using disk utility on it. Talk about a drag!!!
Thanks again for the help...

Never use Maxtors, and never use Lacies.

Your first stop is DiskWarrior to try to fix the directory of the drive. Unfortunately, if you were running Disk Utility on the drive when it crashed, you could be talking about permanent damage. Try DiskWarrior, then TechTool if it doesn't work. If you manage to get your drive to mount properly, backup everything on that drive right away. In my view, any drive that crashed during a format/utility function should be considered moribund and unreliable.


www.derekmok.com

OUCH! That is bad news. I did take the drives out and they still spin which is good in that certain spinning way. (ha ha) When I put it back together the drive DID come back up on my desk top and I opened it up and there were my beloved files. Then it went away and I have not tried anything since. I bought another Maxtor 2TB external drive and will put my drives in that and see if it's the controller. By the way, I was using Disk Warrior and it found all kinds of problem on my Maxtor and then everthing hung up. I had to shut it down and then my problems started happening when I rebooted....

What's best to use for external drives with my Powerbook?

>In my view, any drive that crashed during a format/utility function should be considered
>moribund and unreliable.

Not necessarily. A crash/hang can happen for a variety of reasons (firmware, software bug, mechanical/physical issues, fragmentation, etc). If a crash occurs during a write operation, there is a chance that the directory structure of the drive is damaged, so the drive may not mount (this is where Disk Warrior comes in).

But store bought drives are a BAD idea for media use, as we usually keep the drives running for extended periods.



www.strypesinpost.com

Hey Stypes, What is a store bought drive? Where from and what is the best external drive to buy? Also, if my Maxtor won't boot how can I use DW on it?

Store bought drives are the ones you get when you go to many general computer stores, and they'll have a bunch of external drives. Most of them are not designed for your average home user (they don't come with a fan, so they tend to heat up).



www.strypesinpost.com

Where do you buy yours from and what make/model? My Maxtor 2TB One Touch has a fan.

> What is a store bought drive?

Basically, anything you buy from Best Buy, Target, Circuit City (R.I.P.), Fry's and other "consumer" electronics and home-appliance outlets would usually fall short in a professional video environment. Lacies, Western Digitals, Maxtors, iomegas. Video editing is very data intensive, and most of these drives simply were not designed for heavy tasks like real-time video editing -- for example, many of them come only with a USB port, which would cause problems even if you're editing simple, lowly DV video. Seagate is about the only brand I've seen in a retail outlet that has a chance of making the grade.

I swore by Promax drives for years, but they don't sell smaller JBOD drives anymore. G-Tech drives used to have a good reputation, but their quality and reliability has gone down substantially in the last two years or so. For smaller (under 2TB) drives these days, I'd consider OWC (Otherworldcomputing.com), Seagate, WiebeTech. CalDigit storage units are frequently recommended in here, but I haven't used them myself.

> Also, if my Maxtor won't boot how can I use DW on it?

Drives don't "boot" unless they are being used as the system drive (startup disk) of the computer. "Mount" is the correct term.

DiskWarrior can often "see" a drive that fails to mount in Mac OS. Try launching DiskWarrior first, then plugging in and turning on the external drive.


www.derekmok.com

"Mount" is correct and I thought something sounded funny as I wrote in haste...so how do I mount a drive that "won't mount"?
ALSO: My Maxtor 2TB One Touch drive has USB (would never use that for media) 400 and 800 FireWire. Is that considered a decent drive to use? TIA

>Seagate is about the only brand I've seen in a retail outlet that has a chance of making the grade.

I'd disagree on this point, D. If you're talking about the Freeagent series, nada. They don't have a fan, so the drive enclosure is flawed by design. You need good components, you need good design and good workmanship. Essentially, you get your bang for your buck.

For the drives, they are split into 2 classes- enterprise and consumer drives. An enterprise level drive would be best (lower URE count), but they cost a lot more, so many of us use consumer drives. Now there are SSD drives in the market, but I haven't worked off them (they're pricey little bombs), so I can't comment much on them, besides that they're much faster than spindle drives.

For physical construction, you'd look for something sturdy, ideally, it should be made of aluminium for better heat conduction, and a large well placed fan for ventilation.

For external enclosures, there is the interface. You have Fibre Channel, SAS, SCSI, eSATA, FW800, FW400, USB... Then there is the chip to the interface, and the RAID controller for RAIDs (software RAID options are limited).

Then there is the power supply module, and WD Mybooks are horrendous in that department.



www.strypesinpost.com

> If you're talking about the FreeAgent series, nada.

Of course, observations on "brand reliability" are generalized. I don't use Seagates myself, I've only used them at a company I work for, and at that place the drives have held up for light DV editing and backups. I don't think those are FreeAgents, either -- but I don't do my drive shopping at consumer retail outlets, so I'm not completely up on what they stock now. But just the design of most of them -- those annoying touch-and-hold on/off buttons, USB connections only, pretty enclosures with no fans -- are enough to send me running away.


www.derekmok.com

Ah, good discourse going on here....