Quicktime Movie

[savage]

I'm scoring to a QT movie. First time I do it this way. It almost works, even without a capture/play card. Still every once in a while I get a DAE error 'drive too slow or fragmented'.... Anything I can do? I read several posts from guys who have cards but still have freeze problems. SUGGESTIONS HIGHLY APPRECIATED ASAP!!!!!
G4 533 900MB RAM
PT 5.1
Mixplus + 4 old DSP farms in a chassis
2*888/24
ATTO Digi
1 internal Seagate 10.000
2 external Seagate 10.000

I have moved thge movie around a little to see if it made any difference. But as trackcount grows the problem persists.

?????????PLEASE???????????

[DigiTechSupt]

Make sure that you are not playing the video and audio from the same drive. In fact, it is preferable to have the audio and video on separate buses.

Steve

[savage]

Thanks Steve. I already did everything the book says. I have to doublecheck inside the G4 if the internal and external are on two busses or one. I expect thm to be on one to avoid narrow devices on the same bus as a HD. On two busses I assume I'll have a problem with my CD burner, since Masterlist does not support the internal Mac Drive, so I got to have the external burner on one bus. Putting a HD on the same bus, i would expect, would slow down that HD so I'll end up going nowhere..
So - - - ehhh, what is Digidesign's idea?
Besides, I ran a sequence with 3 of the heavier plugins muted. Without having doublechecked, it seems there is no problem then. But i need the plugins.....
What to do?.

[Avid]

just the web guy here, not a tech, so take these as uneducated guesswork...

First, can't you remove the burner from the SCSI card when you aren't using it? That would give you more options for trying different drive connections.

Also, in the SCSI64 FAQ section:
http://answerbase.digidesign.com/detail.cfm?DID=3997

I am getting DAE -9073 errors (drive too slow), what causes this error?

Basically the drive cannot keep up with what you are asking it to do ie; too many tracks on one drive. Try splitting your audio tracks up amongst multiple drives to prevent this error. Digidesign recommends at least three drives for 64 tracks of playback.

See Compatibility Documents for drive specifications.

ID:3997 Created:08/21/2000

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">If you haven't already done so, take a look at all of the SCSI64 FAQs, for something that might be a clue like termination recommendations and ATTO Express-Pro Tools settings.

This might be a dumb idea, ...and I'm sure someone will let me know if it is [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img] ...but since nothing else has worked, have you tried putting the video on your startup drive and spreading the audio on the other 3 drives? If you had still another drive for the video, like a second IDE drive or firewire drive, that would be the place to run the video.

You didn't mention how many tracks you have or how much RAM you have allocated to Pro Tools and DAE. You might want to try giving them both a bunch, maybe 300 each since you have 900 to play with.

[Boom Chic]

Did you try running the movie from your internal drive?

I have an internal (separate from the startup drive) dedicated just for video. Fast internal scsi bus on my 9600.

Audio is connected to 2 X 9 gig Glyphs connected via Adaptec 2940uw scsi accellerator.

I use the Miro Motion DC 30 plus for capture and playback.

Hide the video track in Pro Tools, better performance this way, but that won't help your "drive too slow or fragmented" problems. Maybe your drive IS too slow or fragmented? How full is your drive?

If you are running your audio from one of your external drives, put the video on the other.

What sort of resolution is your QT video?

[savage]

Hi Karen, thans for your help. QT is 240*320. I have tried running QT off the native HD and either SCSI HD and a FireWire HD as well. Same result.

BUT!!!!!!! Today I tried to tk out plug-ins one by one, and right now it seems like the real villain may be the tc works plug-ins. I had two of them in there....when I removed them - no stops! No stops ever since (I hardly dare write this I don't want to provoke the thing.......

savage

[Lee Blaske]

The 9600 is quite different from the G4, so not much of what applies to that machine applies to a G4.

Regarding the ATTO, you CAN run a narrow device (or devices) on the same bus as a wide device, as long as you use the proper adapter, and have all your narrow devices at the end of the chain.

Check out Granite Digital www.granitedigital.com for quality adapters.

There's a good chance that splitting video and audio between an internal IDE drive and SCSI or SCSI and FireWire might not work well.

Personally, I'm having great success with a G4 733 using two FireWire drives (Oxford 911). I put the video (usually 340 x 240 digitized at 500k per second) on the second drive. I have had no trouble playing 32 tracks of audio plus video from one FireWire drive (although I don't do extremely heavy audio slicing, dicing, and cross-fading).

Finally, with 900 MB of memory in your G4, you might experiment with putting your video on a RAM Disk, and playing it from memory (if the movie is of reasonable size).

Lee Blaske

[Lee Blaske]

An additional thought...

Since you have internal as well as external drives on the same bus of your ATTO card, check to make sure that all your drive termination issues are squared away. (It's simpler when everything's on one chain outside the computer [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img] ).

Lee Blaske