720P30 capture issues with new MacBookPro+FCStudio2

[Steve Mullen]

Originally Posted by Dave Beaty

What I found most interesting was that the sustained speed of the hard drive had almost EVERYTHING to do with clips splitting in the middle of the take.
Dave Beaty

We (I) came to the concusion that 720p60 -- which forces the system to capture 2X more frames -- causes problems because FCP get's slightly behind and captures a TC "later" than it expects to find. Other software may not check TC.

Why with 720p30?

What comes to mind as an old programmer of realtime applications -- some UNIX process starts running and steals cycles. The obvious are Mail, internet, Calander. But, the are dozens upon dozens processes that run. Many of them started by applications that aren't currently running.

I would remove anything non-Apple you have added since purchase. And turn-off all network connections.

[George Strother]

Steve -

Do you think multiple boot partitions on the first hard drive would effect FCP performance?

This was suggested once by Apple support, but I didn't notice any improvement in the problem I was having at the time.

If there isn't any basis for this suggestion, a boot partition for FCP only and a boot partition for a complete system might be worth a try.

Living without Photoshop, Episode, software updates, etc. permanently would cripple an edit workstation a bit.

[Steve Mullen]

Originally Posted by George Strother

Living without Photoshop, Episode, software updates, etc. permanently would cripple an edit workstation a bit.

Sorry -- I meant just a trial to see if you could find the problem. Or, do you know anyone you can take VTR and tape to and see if they can capture -- and if they can capture to your FW drive.

Also run Activity Monitor during capture and look for something other than FCP to grab CPU cycles.

[Justin Ferar]

Well, for what it's worth...

If you are like me and need to capture whole tapes without breaks the Intensity Pro works perfectly.

Repeat- whole tapes, no subclipping.

If you are lucky enough to have the BR-HD50 and a MacPro- save yourself the firewire headaches. Capture via HDMI as ProRes and move on.

720p60! No problem!

[Dave Beaty]

Having two systems to check things on is a god send when you have problems. So many times it seems like it has to be a bug, when in fact it may be system related.

I was lucky in that we have several Mac Pro Final Cut edit rooms that are almost identical.

I was getting lots of split clips on time lapses we were shooting. So I was happy when JVC released an update to address the problem.

Yet the problem persisted. I was capturing on a new Mac Pro that did not have an external drive. A new clip was created every 10 secs or so.

I took the same tape to another edit room and it captured flawlessly- One 20 minute clip. I never did run a speed test on the first Mac Pro HD to see what the sustained read and write was. But apparently the splits were the result of using the internal either speed or system overhead I do not know. I would suspect any drive that has problems would cause issues.

Steve, perhaps you know, I had a producer bring me an external WD FW 800 drive. I was having problems and realized it was formatted with FAT32 from the manufacturer. Perhaps that could be a problem with some of the external drives. I reformatted the drive and all is well. Is there a conversion that happens on Macs when using FAT32 devices or would it be the same as a Mac OS formatted drive...just something to ponder.


Dave Beaty