Longish Clips Won't Transfer

[Michael Robson Rowe]

Hello

I have a Sony HDR-SR11 camera with a number of files on the hard drive.

I'm using FCE and attempting to do a log and transfer. All works as advertised except for three files (which perhaps by coincidence) are each in excess of 10 minutes long. Attempting to transfer each of these files results in an undefined error, and no transfer.

For what it's worth, they imported in to iMovie 8 without difficulty. However I bought FCE for the superior editing, etc, etc, and am frustrated that I can't complete my project (family wedding video) until I get these files loaded.

I am using a firewire drive as remote storage, and nothing else on USB except for the camera.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks and regards

Michael

[Jerome Marot]

I have two ideas, actually.

First: add mode memory if you can. For a reason I do not understand, the conversion from avchd to aic can require large amounts of free memory.

Second: if the takes are already imported in iMovie, you can use these imports in fce. The most efficient way is to left click on the iMovie data file, click "show package content", and look for the actual .mov file that you want.

[Michael Robson Rowe]

Hi Jerome, and thanks so much for your reply.

To take the second point first, I can find the appropriate .mov files in iMovie, but when I import them into FCE (using the import menu option) they appear to come in as aliases or similar (ie just pointers to the file on the laptop's hard drive without actually importing the file across to the new firewire drive.) Surely importing a .mov should be just that - importing to the designated scratch disk?

Also - did some googling on mode memory but still not completely sure I know what you mean. Can you give me a little more info on this please?

Again Jerome, thank you so much for your interest and involvement!

Regards

Michael

[Michael Robson Rowe]

Here's an interesting thing - upon reflection I thought instead of importing, why not just drag the .mov files from iMovie to the appropriate folder in FCE? So first I dragged the file onto the desktop. Worked fine. Then I opened the appropriate folder on the scratch disk in FCE (the one with all the other clips in it) and dragged and dropped the file into it. Got an error message ("Unexpected Error"). Tried copying and pasting, same thing. It just won't go into that folder...

Since when can't I even drop a file into a folder on another disk????????

Cheers

Michael

[Michael Robson Rowe]

And for what it's worth, in the scratch disk screen of the System Settings I have Video Capture, Video Render and Audio Render ticked and set to my firewire disk (the other menu choice is Audio Capture which is greyed out.

Waveform Cache, Thumbnail Cache and Autosave Vault all set to the firewire disk with 415.2GB of space available.

Minimum Allowable Free Space on Scratch Disks is set to 2047 MB (should I increase this?) and the two "limit capture" checkboxes are unchecked.

In the memory and cache tab Memory Usage is 100% for Application (1724 MB). Is that my problem perhaps?

The files I'm trying to bring onto the scratch disk are around 7 GB.

Thanks again,

Michael

[Jerome Marot]

I don't understand what you are trying to do. Is FCE on a different computer than the laptop? If you just want to free some space on the laptop, you could just move the entire iMovie package file to the external drive, couldn't you?

[Michael Robson Rowe]

Both FCE and iMovie applications are on the MacBook Pro. I want to keep the applications on the MacBook Pro and use the scratch disk for the actual clips/files. When I drag one of the three larger files out of iMovie (in .mov format), and try to drag it onto the scratch disk, I get an "Unexpected Error". If I drag the folder containing all the files (.mov format) onto the disk, the smaller files transfer just fine. The three larger ones give an "Unexpected Error". This happens whether the drive connected to the MacBook by Firewire or USB.

I know this sounds like I must be doing something basically stupid, but I don't think I am. Even with FCE not started, I can't transfer these files onto the disk. That sounds like a disk issue rather than an FCE one doesn't it? I might take it to a friend's set up and see if he can transfer files.

At least I'm relatively sure it's not something I'm doing, and there's no simple and obvious solution.

Thanks

Michael

[Jerome Marot]

I think that I know what the problem is: if you have formatted your hard disk with FAT or FAT32, the maximum file size is 4 Gbytes. Reformat your hard disk using HFS+ (the mac file system).

[Michael Robson Rowe]

Just did the reformat and transfered one of the big files and it worked perfectly, Jerome.

Thank you SO MUCH for contributing your thoughts. It was one of those niggling little things that I could work around, but which really detracted from the confidence I had in the system.

Appreciate your continued interest and bravo for finding the solution.

Cheers

Michael