Dubbing Major Pix, More Problems

[BigBobMXMan]

Another related problem to the one I listed before, from a region of 14 trk music, I copied the 1st region from one drum track, using "option Drag", trimmed it out to full length, saved and closed the session. When I opened the session again, the original piece I copied was gone, not the next which I had expanded but the one after which I didn't even touch was gone and not the one after. Again the back ups were the same. Another time I opened up the same session and fix I had last made was there but not the one before. Also I pulled the drive, put it back in ANOTHER bay, and it asked to find every sound file so I did then saved it, but every time I open it now (even though I put it back in the original Bay) I have to locate all the sound files. We're dubbing "Rush Hour 2" which releases Aug 3 and has a director who loves to yell at us, and an EXTREMELY anal editor so we can't be holding up the dub. Does anyone know if 5.1.1 fixes these? I downloaded it last night but I'm scared to put it in and have even more problems. Tech support isn't open till Monday HELP!

[sleadley]

It sounds like you have encountered one little know problem with ProTools. Its inability to work with Hot Swap drives. Even though Glyph and many others sell the removable caddys, ProTools does not support this, more correctly the Mac OS does not support it it seems to me. I was dubbing a very big movie recently and all the other editors had problems with lost files screwed directories etc. I, on the other hand, did not. The difference, I never hot swap.Ever. Shut down, spin down, load new drive, then restart. This will almost never result in the problems that you describe.
Even Hot swapping firewire drives will cause problems. remember that when the digi init runs at boot it polls the SCSI bus to see what drives are connected. (This is what used to happen anyway on the PT III systems and I assume it is still the same now) If you hot swap then the init gets confused as well as the OS and the files that have just been added do not get updated correctly.
My info is purely conjecture, but it does work better if you avoid Hot swapping altogether.
Simon L.

[Disco_Doctor]

100% Right.

Do not hot swap. Ever. Never ever. "Hot swap" is a misnomer. The Glyph drives are "removable" -- they are not "hot swaps" on the Mac OS. If ya gotta change drives, the 5 minutes it takes to shut down, swap drives, and reboot, is a lot less time than hosing a drive and losing data and having to restore it if you actually bothered to make a backup.

[img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[John McDaniel]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR> Do not hot swap. Ever. Never ever. "Hot swap" is a misnomer. The Glyph drives are "removable" -- they are not "hot swaps" on the Mac OS. If ya gotta change drives, the 5 minutes it takes to shut down, swap drives, and reboot, is a lot less time than hosing a drive and losing data and having to restore it if you actually bothered to make a backup. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

What!?!

We "hot swap" daily. You MUST drag the hard drive to the trash to unmount it. We then use an Apple utility to mount the drive on another system. I'll admit that sometimes the utility doesn't see the drive and a re-boot makes it appear on its own, but we almost never Quit out of Pro Tools, so I'll have to see if quitting PT will allow the utility to mount the drive 100% of the time. I'm using Kingston bays and swapping between 2 PT mix rigs and an AM II workstation.

j mcd

[clutch]

We also hot swap constantly. We have over 50 drives in Kingston bays which we swap between 16 G3's and 4's of varying speeds. All running PT 5.1.1.
Hard Disk Toolkit takes care of the mounting and dismounting with ease. (strangely better than FWB mounter)
We have about a 98% success rate with hot swapping and haven't lost a byte so far...touch wood etc.
Anytime a drive doesn't mount the first time we just mount holding down the command key and it fixes it a treat. The 2 directory problems we've had so far were zapped by Disk Warrior in minutes.
I'd go crazy if we had to go back to the old days of restarting when adding a drive. We would have lost many many hours by now...

BigBob: Did you try rebuilding the desktop file on the drive? Run Disk Warrior over the drive and see if that helps your dodgy files and structure.
Often the file structure is damaged when the drive is not spun down correctly.
Be anal about letting your drives spin down enough when you dismount - you can increase the amount of spin down time in the bays themselves to be safe. Check the manual on how to do it.
If I have a problem mounting I dismount the non-mounted drive whilst holding down the option and command keys in Hard Disk Toolkit and remount. Works almost every time.
Hope some of this helps...

Chris

[sleadley]

I know that lots of people hot swqap all the time...But believe me, you should not do it. Dragging to trash and then remounting does not always work. You admit that yourself, so there is something fishy going on here. My advice do not do it if you want to keep your data. I had more than 800 gig of data on a recent film I did and I lost nothing, while others who were hot swapping continually were forever running norton to fix little problems. Some that they could not fix
Simon L.

[sleadley]

I know that lots of people hot swqap all the time...But believe me, you should not do it. Dragging to trash and then remounting does not always work. You admit that yourself, so there is something fishy going on here. My advice do not do it if you want to keep your data. I had more than 800 gig of data on a recent film I did and I lost nothing, while others who were hot swapping continually were forever running norton to fix little problems. Some that they could not fix
Simon L.

[BigBobMXMan]

Well Thanks guys, but remember most of these problems occurred before I swapped out any drives and if I could, I never would swap but with the narrow drives and the stupidly few PCI slots (for another slow SCSI card) I have to use a USB to SCSI adaptor that is THREE times slower than the regular built in slow SCSI on the old macs, so I use the second editors' 9600 rig to XFER. And he's doing the source so we have to get material from one machine to the other, and we have temps on one drive, temp stems on another, back ups on one and Updates on yet another. Anyway since 5.1 we have yet to open a session and NOT have to look for fades, usually the same one (how is THAT possible) but we skip 'em obviously. We keep them all in one file for all reels, not reccomended I know but we got stuff from the mixer all in one session for all reels and have been going so fast and furious and making so many changes so often, I am just now starting to copy to a third drive and do "Housekeeping"! We do back up all over the place and I wanted to keep all new scoring & re-mixes on a separate drive, (some pieces have been remixed 4 times, each time getting more string offs and separation). Any and ALL options must be available immediatly. Wish us luck we still haven't finished three re-scores in 4ab, let alone a complete run through or fixes on all reels, but Print Mastering was pushed from Tuesday to Thursday and we only had ONE region misteriously disappear today.

[FajitaTone]

ever think of a SAN? TranSoft or something like that?