FCP: Edit Drive Ejects During Log & Transfer Import

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pac313

New member
Hi,

I'm working on a project in FCP 6 using mostly AVCHD footage shot on a Panasonic AF100.
Some clips are over 1 hour in duration, and when I try to import those, using Log and Transfer, my external edit drive ejects, and then FCP gives me an error message saying: "Low Disk Space
The volume 'XXXXXX' is about to run out of disk space. The transfer queue has been paused. Please clear some space and select continue or select stop to abort the ingest and delete the clip."

This only happens with the AVCHD clips that are very long. The short clips import fine.
I know my drive is not full - there is close to 1TB free.

My raw footage is on a separate external drive, and during the import process I have the raw footage drive and the edit drive mounted. Only the edit drive is ejected during the import.

I do have my Cache and Scratch files all on the same drive - my edit drive. Could that be an issue perhaps?

I've checked in the FCP System Settings to insure the 'Limit Capture/Export File Segment Size' and 'Limit Capture Now' boxes are unchecked.

Thanks in advance for any help with this.

Olaf
 
Is your edit drive formatted as FAT32? Fat32 has a 4gb file size limit. AVCHD gets around FAT32 formatted SDHC cards (or whatever medium) by spanning the file over multiple 4GB files. But when you import them into FCP via log and transfer, you're converting them to 1 large ProRes file... which for longer takes, will easily surpass 4GB in size.

If your drive is FAT32, you'll need to back everything on it to a separate drive, then format it with Disk Utility to a mac formatted drive.
 
Thanks for your replies. Sorry it took me so long to respond myself.
Yes, the drives are daisy-chained, using firewire 800 ports. This has not caused problems like that in the past.

My drives are all mac formatted.

I have just started using a new drive, as my original 2TB edit drive is now full. I'm now using two 2TB drives as edit drives.
So far I haven't had the above problem, and I've imported plenty of clips 40 mins + in duration. I'll report back if the problem does persist - perhaps it happens when the drive has less than 10% storage space, or maybe the drive was defective?

Thanks for all your help so far.
 
Daisy-chaining FireWire devices can be a tricky deal. FW devices are finicky; some play nice together and some don't. I suspect that your new drive may not like the other.

pac313 said:
... perhaps it happens when the drive has less than 10% storage space, or maybe the drive was defective?
Click to expand...

You should never have a drive past 85% capacity. The drive needs headroom in order to function smoothly. When you do conversions, compressions, and transfers, the destination drive often needs to sequester at least twice the space that will be used in the end, as one is a temporary file that is used for the data in transit.
 
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