Hi,

Maybe one of you gurus can give me some advice. I've been trying to reconfigure my edit suite so I can have an asst. digitize footage on my G4 800MP frreing me up to take that footage and go right to edit on my G5 2Gig MP while he moves on to digitizing the next show. In anticipation of HD (really HDV) editing that may require higher throughput and in order to make use of my older hi speed SCSI arrays (I have numerous externals SCSI drives and arrays left over from my media 100 stations) I tried this:

I bought two Adaptec ADP 39160 PCI-X twin channel SCSI driver cards capable of 160 MB/S on each channel so that my assitant could digitize to an external array (with Seagate Cheetahs or Barracudas) and tried installing one of the 39160s into the G5 (first). (Apple recommends that this type of card go in slot 3 or 4 (not 2)).

I got the machine to read both channels of the card and got one of the arryas to show up on the desktop. I digitized (Beta) footage to that drive with FCP4.1. But the clip never showed up in the logging bin in FCP. It did however show up as an untitled quicktime clip on the SCSI array and when I clicked on it would play back fine in Quicktime. But I wonder why I can't get it to show up in FCP? Any answers?

Qustion 2

The plot thickens. I then tried hooking up the other SCSI Raid to the second channel of the adaptec card and when I restarted the computer neither drive array showed up on the desktop even though the Mac was seeing both channels of the card and all volumes (as evidenced when I checked out "about this Mac" in system profile. I've tried restarting the computer, reseating the card, switching cards and switching PCI slots.
This is a mystery to me. Am I making a mistake going with fast SCSI drives?

I've had probelms in the past trying to digitize to an external firewire drive (Lacie Big Disk) via the firewire 400 port of the G4 (dropped frames ) and felt this more expensive route might be a better solution.

Right now I have no soution and haven't done anything to speed up my edit process (which was the original intent)

Anybody out there know what I should do or what i'm doing wrong? Apple couldn't really offer any help so I don't know where to go from here.

I would appreciate your input.

Thanks,

J D

How is the SCSI chain terminated? I always had to use active termination to get reliable use out of SCSI drives.

yes it's aways the simple things. I'm not quite there but after playing around with stuff and calling apple three times they put me in touch with a drive expert who helped me trouble shoot and trination is one of the first things he asked - that along with unique non-conflicting id numbers and the way the drives were formatted. Some of these drives were used with my older 96oo Power Mac and worked fine but I guess OS 10.3 likes HFS etended journaled format. so the drives have all been reformatted, terminated and are on different channels of the card. The computer still will only see one array at a time but that's OK. I'm going to try digitizing in FCP and see if they work better now.

Thanks again for the advice.

J D

Try turning the drives on in a different order. Start the computer then the drives and vice versa.

I'm afriad of SCSI voodoo and was always told to start the drives first and turn them off last. I guess the real question is if this is the right approach. Do I really need the speed (and expense and temperment) of SCSI drives to accomplish what I'm trying to do. Maybe this is problematic because it wasn't meant to be. And do I truly acrue any advantage by having scsi's?

J D

FireWire technically has the speed to handle HD. However, most people want more headroom and FireWire 800 provides that and more. Your G5 supports FireWire 800 natively. Your G4 would need a PCI card like this. (http://www.orangemicro.com/fw800pci.html)

i wouldn't be as concerned about SCSI voodoo with OS X as OS 9. OS X is much more robust the 9. If it doesn't work, no harm done.

Hey thanks,

I should have postd questoins and done more research before i went to the bother of buying those two Adaptec cards. Great advice. I may buy that Orange firewire2 card at some point and fully utilize my Lacie Big Disk. It would have been a much cheaper route than the one I took.

J D