Okay, I'm stumped. I need a Mac genius.

Donald Moon

Donald Moon

Member
Hi, I have a Macbook 13" with a LaCie 320GB external HDD for storing my footage.

I bought the drive so I could free up my Macbook of some space and have a place dedicated to media, like most people do, I'll assume.

My main problem is, I cannot "daisy chain" my camera deck, HDD, and Macbook. My LaCie has two Firewire 800 ports and one 400. My Macbook has only one 400. So I upload footage, then transfer. Sounds simple enough, right?

Well I went to upload my first bit of footage and my Mac says I only have about 2 gigs of space. Assuming that's enough for an hour of footage, I clicked capture. It stopped about 30 mins through and said "the capture has been stopped due to a lack of drive space".

NOW, my question is, what is taking up so much damn space on my Macbook? I deleted lots of old footage and transfered all my keepable stuff to my LaCie. It then said I had about 3 gigs. So I click capture again, only for it to stop me with the same message again in about 5 mins.

I really don't have any extra programs other than FCE. Is there any way to check and see what the system doesn't use? I'd like to free up some space so that I can actually get my money's worth here. Thanks in advance, hope I didn't make it too confusing.
 
You have a lot of options, all requiring money:

- A firewire hub
- A new external hard drive with more than one firewire 400 port (to daisy chain)
- Xslimmer, which can delete the PowerPC code from all of your applications, saving you GBs worth of HD space
- WhatSize? Which tells you where your HD memory is being used the most.
 
Did you install the entire Final Cut Suite? There is a ton of media that eats up a bunch of space, like audio loops, motion templates, etc.
 
Donald Moon said:
Hi, I have a Macbook 13" with a LaCie 320GB external HDD for storing my footage.

I bought the drive so I could free up my Macbook of some space and have a place dedicated to media, like most people do, I'll assume.

My main problem is, I cannot "daisy chain" my camera deck, HDD, and Macbook. My LaCie has two Firewire 800 ports and one 400. My Macbook has only one 400. So I upload footage, then transfer. Sounds simple enough, right?

Well I went to upload my first bit of footage and my Mac says I only have about 2 gigs of space. Assuming that's enough for an hour of footage, I clicked capture. It stopped about 30 mins through and said "the capture has been stopped due to a lack of drive space".

NOW, my question is, what is taking up so much damn space on my Macbook? I deleted lots of old footage and transfered all my keepable stuff to my LaCie. It then said I had about 3 gigs. So I click capture again, only for it to stop me with the same message again in about 5 mins.

I really don't have any extra programs other than FCE. Is there any way to check and see what the system doesn't use? I'd like to free up some space so that I can actually get my money's worth here. Thanks in advance, hope I didn't make it too confusing.
Click to expand...


Make sure that you have selected your scrath disk in Final Cut, which would be the Lacie drive. You can chain all your firewire units even though you only have one firewire input on the Mac, you connect the drive to the Mac, the camera to the drive. If you have more than you have to connect a firewire hub to the Mac which will give you multiple outputs.

Make sure that all units are on before turning on the Mac. I have 6 drives connected in my system using a hub and no problems.. Also when connecting firewire units make sure the unit you're connecting is off even though they tell you that they are hot swappable. I burned a Sony deck, then Sony tells me is not a good idea to connect and disconnect without turning the unit off.
Good luck
 
Winston Vargas said:
Make sure that you have selected your scrath disk in Final Cut, which would be the Lacie drive. You can chain all your firewire units even though you only have one firewire input on the Mac, you connect the drive to the Mac, the camera to the drive. If you have more than you have to connect a firewire hub to the Mac which will give you multiple outputs.

Make sure that all units are on before turning on the Mac. I have 6 drives connected in my system using a hub and no problems.. Also when connecting firewire units make sure the unit you're connecting is off even though they tell you that they are hot swappable. I burned a Sony deck, then Sony tells me is not a good idea to connect and disconnect without turning the unit off.
Good luck
Click to expand...

He can't daisy chain, as his MacBook only has 1 FW400 and his drive only has 1 FW400 port, the other 2 are FW800. What you can do is buy a firewire 800 to 400 adapter like this--

http://www.amazon.com/Sonnet-FireWire-400-Adapter-FAD-824/dp/B0000CDJPQ

Or buy an external firewire hub, which will add more ports to your MacBook.
 
Your bigger problem is that that is way too little free space on your hard drive. How much memory do you have? OSX uses what used to be called virtual memory all the time. With so little free space most of it is probably getting filled by memory swapping the system does. Your machine will also run like a slug. One big hunk if space is with Soundtrack Pro content (around 27gigs). I would move this and the Motion content to the external hard-drive and then delete the stuff from your system drive. Also get the adapter and capture directly to the external drive. You don't want to be capturing or working from your system drive, it will cause all kinds of problems.
 
WOW getting rid of Soundtrack, Livetype and Apple Loops helped SO much lol. Omni Sweep also helped alot. Does anyone here have any experience with the 400-800 adapter? Thanks so much for the fasst responses guys!
 
Donald Moon said:
...Well I went to upload my first bit of footage and my Mac says I only have about 2 gigs of space. Assuming that's enough for an hour of footage, I clicked capture. It stopped about 30 mins through and said "the capture has been stopped due to a lack of drive space".
Click to expand...

what kind of footage? 2 gigs is nothing.

dv takes up roughly 200mb per minute, so 2gb = 10 minutes.

dvc pro hd 720p is around 400mb per minute so 2gb only gets you 5 minutes.

i have captured succesfully on my macbook using a FW hub. connect the drive and the cam to the hub. just don't daisychain. works great.
 
A firewire hub on a single FW bus Mac such as a Macbook has a distinct potential for DFs.

You can't keep diluting that single bus Mac with multiple devices and expect it to play nicely with all of them.
 
David S. said:
A firewire hub on a single FW bus Mac such as a Macbook has a distinct potential for DFs.

You can't keep diluting that single bus Mac with multiple devices and expect it to play nicely with all of them.
Click to expand...
All Macs use a single FW bus for all the built in FW ports.


-A
 
The adapter is on the way, but now I have a new problem. I send all my footage over to my LaCie and went into the Final Cut Express Documents folder because I saw there was alot being used in there too. I cleared out the folders of "Rendered Files", "Capture Scratch" and things like that. Now none of my projects will open. Apparently I NEEDED that stuff. What was all that stuff in the folders and why did I need it? I guess I'll need to re-upload my footage once I can choose my LaCie as the scratch disk.
 
you just need to re-connect your media files, which you copied to your hard drive, right? render files can be re-written.
 
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