Live show Recording ProTools Nightmare

[kickit]

Set your record time for how long the set is helps a lot. Otherwise it poles the hole drive & most time does not figure it correctly. Recorded to a 250 gig drive that I believe was already more than half full 16 [email protected] 16 bit for 3plus hrs. No hickups.

[mwingerski]

well, yes and no.
PT needs space on the disk to allocate to.
it simply doesn´t work with full disks, and PT is not the only system that doesnt.
the compatoy are not total BS, the have their eligibility, but their are very "pessimistic"; but if you do as they say, you won´t have a problem.

First of all, I began the night with 100GB of free space on a 160 GB drive. The first crash that I got, when the system simply FROZE and gave me the spinning beach ball, seemed to have eaten up about 60 GB because I learned this morning that all 27 files were 1.98 GB (the ones it was writing when it crashed)... I suppose I now know to check the audio files that are being written to get rid of them after a crash... (although that is a problem in and of itself.

I will agree that a totally empty drive would have been the way to go (and have usually done so but time was not permitting to get one)
However, I too have recorded lots of tracks on drives with this much space and never had a problem.
mostly i want to know why I'm getting automation errors if the problem is actually one of free space?

Also, if we all follow the digi guidelines, we would be spending 10grand a month on drives and have to use a tower of them to record anything at all. That is both spatially and financially impractical. Plenty of other recording applications are not nearly as finicky about drives.

It is really amazing how expensive an HD system is and yet it is so inflexible.

Still very thankful that I have a non digidesign backup.

[Matt Rouch]

"too much automation data being written (error -36). Try thinning some automation data"

If it makes you feel any better, I have had this same error on other Pro Tools systems, going all the way back to pre-mix systems (I started with 4.2 in 1998).

I honestly don't know what causes it, because I've had it happen when there were only a half dozen tracks and no automation whatsoever! It seems very random to me. It hasn't happened often, maybe a dozen times or so in eight years, but it has happened not just with TDM systems, but also with an m-Box running 6.4LE and, later, 6.7LE, as well as with a 001 running 5.3LE on OS 9.2.

I'll trash the prefs (I'm not sure if that fixes the problem but it can't hurt), shut down the computer and restart it. This seems to exorcise the gremlins. I can't really relate it to anything I did or any particular condition of Pro Tools at the time, and since it doesn't happen often I've never really figured out why it happens at all.

I don't believe, however, that it's a RAM, CPU or drive issue, especially since it seems to happen regardless of the actual density or automation data - and even when there's none. I think it's a bug. A rare bug mind you, but an exasperating one when it happens.

[Barnabas]

I had a similar situation happen at a live recording. Random freezes, but not the "too much automation data being written" error you got. Luckily I was doing a free recording at my own church.

My problem turned out to be a bad system drive (in a G4 tower). Most of the time the computer worked just fine, but it would freeze every once in a while. Sometimes I could just restart PT, and sometimes I had to restart the computer. I reformated the drive with a fresh system and fresh PT, and still had the random freezes. Then I replaced the drive with a new one, and have not had a problem since. It might not be a problem with the recording drives.

[GrimmReaperSound]

Protools has a limit of 2048Mb per single audio file.
You said you ended up with 1.98Gb per file,
PT probably hickupped on that limit.

Just a thought but, why didn't you just open a
seperate session per act?
You weren't planning on mixing/editing the entire night in
one PT session were you ?

[sleadley]

Protools has a limit of 2048Mb per single audio file.
You said you ended up with 1.98Gb per file,
PT probably hickupped on that limit.

Just a thought but, why didn't you just open a
seperate session per act?
You weren't planning on mixing/editing the entire night in
one PT session were you ?

This is correct. We recorded a 2hr show live at 96k/24 bit and discovered during testing that the maximum was 2 hrs and 3 min (this is the 1.98 GB per file that is mentioned) We tested the whole system with 4 SCSI drives (24 Tracks per Drive) and we discovered the limit. This was OK as the Show was 2 Hrs for Part 1 and 1hr 45 for part 2. We recorded both Acts in 1 session which was OK the limit is only about the actual file size. The Second act was however recorded to a separate 4 drives as I suspected that fragmentation might be a problem
It seems from your post that this file size is reached only because open allocation was used, which pre allocates the maximum files size (1.98 GB) per track. I would also suggest that you look at the system usage window to see how the CPU was going, perhaps there was a PCI bus problem with the chassis connected that caused the beachball crash. I agree that it could also be a faulty system drive (I have seen the same symptoms as you describe) Try creating a boot drive with a clean install of the system and Pro Tools and record the same number of tracks and see what happens then.
Live work can be very stressful. The live concert that I did was the Eagles in Melbourne, I could not imagine how I would have felt if the recording stopped (we has 72 Tracks at 24/96 running) and the backup was only 48 tracks (some were submixed) But it worked for 3 nights (we generated around 250 GB of data per night, backing up took 6 hrs every night after the show) without a glitch.
Hope this helps
Simon L.

[Andi R]

Protools has a limit of 2048Mb per single audio file.

This is VERY interesting, I did not know that.
Where is this info from? Is it in the manual???
This explaines why I can only allocate 4 hrs in 44,1!!!

Thanks for the Info!

[Stig Eliassen]

Where is this info from? Is it in the manual???

Might be in the manual...I found it here

[Matt Rouch]

The 2048 file-size limit might explain the first crash, but not the subsequent five crashes, nor why mwingerski was getting a screen about automation data. And if the drive was full, it should trigger a window that tells you so. I have inadvertantly filled hard drives while recording in Pro Tools in the past, and what happens is Pro Tools stops recording and tells you that you've run out of disc space. Of course, if the drive was badly fragmented, and you're trying to lay down 27 tracks at 96k, the drive might be going nuts trying to find tiny places to lay down minute fragments of the nearly half a gigabyte that's going through the pipe every minute. That could probably make the system crash, but even that should bring up a screen that says, "The drive is too slow or fragmented."

Just to be clear, I'm not saying the file size or condition of the drive couldn't trigger the automation warning he (or she?) had, but rather that it shouldn't. If it did, it's a bug. But as I mentioned earlier, I've also had this problem a few times in the past, and trashing the prefs and then restarting the computer got rid of the problem. Still a bug, but caused by something else.

To mwingerski:

Have you tried firing up the problematic sessions and playing them back? If so, what happens?

[mwingerski]

I have fired up the session and playing it back and it did so just fine. I did trash preferences when I got back and it seemed to work.
My partner and I were able to line up the backup files with the PT tracks that actually "took" and have a functional recording (sans room mics in a few places).

Each act did get its own session.

The PCI meter was fine when we got the automation errors. All the system diagnostics within pro tools looked fine. Of course, I don't really trust what the meters and error message on pro tools say anymore after this. In fact, I don't really trust pro tools at all. Ever.
it's great when I mix. But I think we'll just use it as the third backup and then record from apogees into other hard disk recorders, using the digi stuff simply to control the pres and if it manages to record the show, then great. Seems like an awful expensive remote control and backup though...

A few lessons learned

number one ALWAYS HAVE A NON DIGIDESIGN BACKUP. (or two)

number two Always have a spare drive handy with an exact copy of the session that you got rolling at soundcheck.
--- this however isn't totally flawless, because one of the big problems we had is that we were using the digi PRE's... and if you trash preferences then you lose your ability to control the PRE unless you go through Peripheral setup, and IO setup and occasionally audio midi... way too much time to take up when you're already losing so much of the show... On top of that, the Pre settings will change to wherever they were at the last save so it adds an extra layer of complication in there too... And since there were all those 1.98 GB files sitting on the drive, I don't even think preference trashing would have helped very much.

number three - Always record to a blank drive. Although I am totally baffled by the first freeze where the meters just got stuck and audio still passed through the outputs but all i saw was a spinning beach ball and the apple Activity Monitor showed no activity going to the drive and listed pro tools as not responding... I really would like to figure out what caused THAT... because that seems to be the root of all the subsequent problems. But I am rather angry about the error messages I got afterward. I can't fix a problem when it's incorrectly diagnosed by ProTools.