24Pa - dropped frames with external harddrive

A

andrew_stretch

Member
running into a problem every time I try to capture 24Pa footage shot with my DVX100B. If I set the scratch disc destination to my computer's internal harddrive (I have an imac G5 2GHz Power PC with 2GB RAM running FCPHD 4.5) everything works fine. However, if I set the scratch disc to an external drive (I've tried 2 different ones, both running off firewire 400) The footage attempts to log, then stalls and a message appears saying 'There were dropped frames detected...' As a result, nothing captures. As a side note, I also encountered this same problem using a new powermac running FCP 6. Is this common with 24Pa footage, with too much info for an external drive to handle? Are there external drives that can handle this? Any suggestions? Thanks.
AS
 
Yup- get a faster hard drive or really a faster machine at this point. Move on up to Intel- the water's nice.

Noah
 
External RAID just for DV? No way, there's got to be a problem with his system. An iMac G5 is not a fast computer, but it should handle DV fine.

the drive is probably too full or too old (maybe it's 5400rpm?)

are you doing Advanced pulldown removal during capture? try just doing a capture at 29.97 and then removing the pulldown with Cinema Tools afterwards. the iMac may not be able to keep up with removing the pulldown.
 
bigbossbmb said:
External RAID just for DV? No way, there's got to be a problem with his system. An iMac G5 is not a fast computer, but it should handle DV fine.
Click to expand...

Well, not necessarily.

iMacs have one firewire bus. Sometimes when two devices share that single bus, it results in dropped frames.

Not all devices play fairly on a single FW bus. Canons are notorious for this, and some HDD FW implementations are non standard.

The smoking gun is that capturing to the internal drive creates no problems
 
"iMacs have one firewire bus. Sometimes when two devices share that single bus, it results in dropped frames.

Not all devices play fairly on a single FW bus. Canons are notorious for this, and some HDD FW implementations are non standard.

The smoking gun is that capturing to the internal drive creates no problems"
OK, I think I follow this - pardon my ignorance. So although there are two firewire ports on the back of my imac, those are really only splitting into one bus. And you mentioned canon - I actually use a canon mini dv as my deck to transfer. So is it possible that using my external Harddrive through USB2.0 will have better results? And otherwise, if I capture on to my computer's harddrive, then transfer all of the project files to a destination on my external, should that work?
 
One bus and several ports.

Think a garden hose with several sprinklers attached. Attach one and it goes fine, but attach several all suffer.

Not always true, but that is usually what I look at first.

Don't go to USB because it isn't as fast a FW drives.

Do a test capturing to internal and then transferring to external
 
I know USB is inferior to FW. I was suggesting to the OP that he try that in case it works out better than going to the internal.
 
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