We're mastering a 30min show to XDCAM HD via Kona card/HD-SDI to a PDW-F70 deck from FCP 6.0.3. It's a XDCAM HD sequence with about 95% XDCAM HD footage, and a 5% SD.

As we play the timeline and record to the XDCAM HD deck, as we've done for almost a year now, the show will always freeze in one particular spot. We get the "dropped frames warning" and an additional message in that same warning box, in red text, reads: "RT Extreme has determined the cause to be slow disks", then suggests: "increase disk speed, decrease # of RT layers and limiting RT Bandwidth." So, we skip past the part where it likes to freeze and roll the show again. Sometimes, it will pick a new spot to freeze on.

We've examined the part where it sticks, and it's a single layer of un-"effected" XDCAM HD footage. There doesn't seem to be any reason for it.

We've never had this problem in 11 months we've been mastering this way. We're running a Mac Pro 2x3 Ghz Dual-core with 4 GB of Ram. Our storage is a 2TB Media Vault running on fibre channel.

Is there something we're overlooking?

Try reimporting the footage used for the clip that is failing; give it a different name than the original so the FC cache/pointing files doesn't think it's the exact same file being replaced. If that doesn't work the project itself my have become corrupt.

I'll give that a shot. I imported the clips using XD transfer software, I'll try to re-import them. I'll also try copying the sequence into another project.

Thanks for the advice!

Nick

Just curious Nick... after 11 months, is it possible your discs are getting full? The sustainable data transfer rate drops considerably after the drives get more than 50 percent full.

You didn't indicate in your post how much material is residing on the 2TB RAID.

Just a thought,

-gb-