Log and Transfer taking forever... Literally

William_Robinette

William_Robinette

Shallow Member
Need your help guys.

I am using FCP 6 on a dual 2 GHz G5 with 4 gigs of RAM (OSX 10.5.2). I have hours and hours of DVCPRO-HD material to log and transfer, but the process is taking forever. I'm talking an hour plus for a 12 minute clip. Everything is running off USB HDDs (writting to one, reading from another).

In my activity monitor, my CPU usage never climbs above 15ish%. Is there a reason for this? I'm not that savvy with the older power PC macs, but I am assuming this isn't the normal speed which I can expect out of it.
 
Everything is running off USB HDDs
Click to expand...

Thats your issue right there.

Need at least FW 800 if I'm not mistaken. Don't understand why your reading from one and writing to another? From a Firestore? I haven't really done anything with Log and Transfer but I would think there might be a better work flow.
 
One USB bus...two drives sharing it...data flowing in and out on the same bus. That is your bottleneck. Processors don't really come into play when it comes to log and transfer...because no conversion is taking place, just copy and wrap in QT. And USB is plenty fast, but using the same bus for input from one to another drive...that is your slowdown. If you went from USB to firewire, the speed would be MUCH faster. And you should be using firewire for editing anyway...USB is not good for that. espeically with DVCPRO HD.
 
Is this 1080 24PA that you are removing pulldown on? This might add some time. But generally the rule of thumb is 1GB per min of copy time, and L&T will take slightly longer...like 1GB per 1.15 min. SO if you had a 16GB card, copying might take 16 min, and L&T might take 20 min. Removing pulldown...might take a little longer. I dunno...I shoot and edit 720p 24pn...no pulldown to remove.
 
Yeah, guess no one can really say what it is. It mostly 720pN, and taking way longer then i feel it should. Oh well, thanks for the info anyway.
 
Have you done restarted and experienced the same slowness? I'm not a big mac user but i use one at work sometimes and it seems to have problems after I have connected or disconnect a USB or Firewire drive. Usually this is cured after a restart. Another thing that might help is to do Firewire and Firewire.

I seem to be able to write to firewire drives easier. Do you have enough room to write to the internal drive?

Best,
Andy
 
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