DV and FireWire

[manutara]

I bought a 80 Gb Maxtor Firewire Hardisk, at 5400 RPM, but when getting clips from my DV camcorder (Canon XL-1), to the Maxtor with Final Cut Pro (Great program), i lost frames. What i have to do is first fill up my G4 and then get all to the Maxtor. There are 3400, 5400 and 7200 RPM Firewire. Will the 7200 (more money) solve the problem?
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MAC FOR EVER!!!!!

[Urbansory]

Do you have mirror on desktop selected in the preferences? Do you have virtual memory on? Ummmmm.... I've done a lot of DV stuff on my G4 and I haven't had any real problems, just problems I made. I never lost frames though. How are you capturing the footage? I'm sure you log everything then batch it. Ummmm, let me take a look at my Final Cut. In my setting I have View External Video Using: None

Another thing is that the video is going through the firwire card taking up the majority of the transfer rate, so if you are taking from a DV device then at the same time sending, there will be loss somewhere.

[manutara]

Yes i log everything then batch it. When batching directly to the Maxtor is when i lost frames. I'm working with 320 Mb RAM, and virtual memory always off. I think the tranfer velocity between XL-1 to Maxtor, is not working or the 5400 rpm are not enough. But if i batch direct to the G4, hardisk no problem.

[Urbansory]

Well I think it is the transfering from one firewire device at a very high transfer rate to another. WWhat if one of your firewire cables are bad? Something to consider. Thats the only thing I can think of, since DV video needs a very high transfer rate. If you ever find out the reason please let me know, something for me to look out for, and consider when I buy another hard drive.

[Verdon]

Exact same symptom with my Lacie external 60GB 7200 rpm drive. I also have resorted to filling my PowerBooks internal drive, dumping onto the external and then repeating until done. Once my data is all on the Lacie, editing and exporting back to camera is fine.

Seeing how I bought the external to avoid using the internal for this work, I was dissapointed. I noticed sometime in the last few days that Lacie has announced new drive models (same speed I think) that claim to be better suited for this. I cross my fingers that perhaps a firmware update or something will follow that might improve the capture performance of my 3 week old drive.

Currently I have the DV camera in one port of my PB and the Lacie HD in another with a Lacie CDRW plugged into the HD. Perhaps playing with my cabling arrangement may help. I'll have to try.

salut,

[Urbansory]

Keep me posted, because this really will have an impact on my decision for a external or internal drive

[Verdon]

I will pass on anything I experience, but just a general comment re internal vs external.

I never thought it would make too much of a difference if they were on the same bus and the cabling wasn't an issue. I've always had at least one external drive. Firewire is a new beast to me though.

I know I would never be comfortable having only one drive (and one system folder) on my primary production machine. If you have one drive only and it goes down hard, there's just too much down-time. Customers just don't understand and deadlines won't wait.

2 cents worth,

[manutara]

5400 nor 7200 rpm's!!! That will be a problem. Well i was also dissaponted, but having an external 80 GB extra that could carry easily where a need is just fine.

Lets share any other experience.

[Urbansory]

I have had 2 hard crashes within a year on my one drive. The first crash I had no back ups while the secong I had a backup of everything, and was down for about 2 hours. I really need to get another hard drive, I'm looking at the internal Maxtor 30 gb. Has anyone heard that a G4 will not reconize anything over 30 gb? I don't know if thats true, but someone from Mac-mall tech support told me that, when it comes to internal drives.

[Verdon]

This article discusses FW and DV speed issues and merits of different devices. I'm off to read it now. It may be worth a look.

http://www.barefeats.com/fire17.html

[budgie]

a few things come to mind...

isn't one of the advantages of FW that it needs no computer in the middle of it, so couldn't you squirt a DV stream straight onto a FW HD?

secondly, I think that I read somewhere on Barefeats that Apple's FW ports are actually 2 ports on one controller. The Granite FW card (mentioned on Barefeats and due soon) has one controller per port, so things will be a little speedier. Also, I hear good things about Granite's cables. They had a good rep with SCSI cables and that has continued, it seems, with FW.

[Urbansory]

Does anyone have one of those boards that eliminate the need to render some things, or cuts down on rendering time? I did a project that would have been much better but I grew tired of rendering so often. You can see the movie I made on my site, it's not great, but when I find time I will do a much better short.

[manutara]

Hey Urbansory:

Render what?
Render in Final Cut Pro?
Post your link!!!!

[Urbansory]

One of those hardware boards that render with the hardware instead of the Final cut/Premeire software.

[Urbansory]

The link is on my homepage link, but here it is anyway, http://www.urbansory.com

[manutara]

Originally posted by Urbansory
[

Sorry man, not a Premier fan.

Nice Short!!!

Loved the center window thing!!! What's the secret?

[Urbansory]

I used final cut to put that short together. No secret, I just used the clip controls to crop and adjust the positioning with keyframes and added filters to colorize and blur. The 3D stuff was done in Strata, some elements were made in flash as well. I think the beginning is strong but once the MI sounds return it falls off. I still need to find a board to cut down rendering time when in final cut, some things in that short took HOURS to render, mostly the text and the compositing.

[manutara]

"The center window thing" was when entering your site. The new window centers acording each monitor resolution. Is that true?

The render time…*#!/&/*/!%!!!!. Increasing a lot the RAM assigned to the program(250Mb out of 320) helped…a bit, but helps.

[Urbansory]

ooooohhhhhh that, I though you meant the centered window in the movie. Thats a java script code that is in an Action in golive and it centers on the screen regardless of the resolution.

[manutara]

Originally posted by Urbansory
ooooohhhhhh that, I though you meant the centered window in the movie. Thats a java script code that is in an Action in golive and it centers on the screen regardless of the resolution.

Could you post the needed tag?

I tried to take it from the page source, but it was not there.

Thanks