Firewire drives

dpvollmer wrote on 10/9/2002, 2:58 PM
I received the following message from VV support:


"As for your problem with the error message when you try to prerender, be sure that you do not have your prerender files set to your fire wire drive. This is within project properties. This would definitely cause this problem.

Also make sure that you are not trying to print to tape using files from your firewire drive, as this would cause problems."


Apparently what I am being told is that we should not use a firewire drive for rendering our projects, and we should not use a firewire drive as the source drive when printing to tape. I have experienced problems when capturing and printing to tape from a firewire drive but have not experienced problems rendering (yet!). This morning, though, after copying a 17 min. NTSC AVI file to my C drive and then printing to tape, I experienced a problem with a stutter and blue screen on my DV camcorder. I experienced a similar problem when printing to a firewire external
DVD-R recorder as well.

I do defrag all my drives quite often so I don't believe that was the problem this morning. I also closed my MSN messenger application, disabled Norton antivirus and even disabled my wireless Internet card. No other applications were running and I did not even touch the keyboard. If I knew what Services I could safely shut down I would do that as well. I did follow someone's link on disabling certain services a few weeks ago but maybe there are others that are causing a problem.

So, other than file storage, what in the world good are firewire drives? I have two of them (7200 RPM) connected to my P2.2 WIN XP laptop which only has a 40GB system drive and I was hoping to use the firewire drives for capture, project editing, rendering and then printing to tape and/or creating a DVD.

What alternatives do I have? If there is a fast enough SCSI cardbus card I would use the Medea Raid drives that are connected to another PC.

Any and all suggestions and firewire experiences would be helpful.

Thank you,
David Vollmer

Comments

Paul_Holmes wrote on 10/9/2002, 4:49 PM
I render and print-to-tape on my 7200rpm 80G Firewire drive. I have an Ath 1800 running XP and have had absolutely no problems. It doesn't seem to matter whether I'm working from my 80G internal D drive, or the firewire drive. With my 650mhz laptop I had to shut the laptop down, then restart it before capturing from firewire, or printing-to-tape, but other than that it seemed pretty flawless.
DanielH wrote on 10/9/2002, 5:37 PM
No problem on our sytems 2 P4's and a Toshiba Laptom, works with a USB2 drive too.

Dan
Control_Z wrote on 10/9/2002, 6:57 PM
Unfortunately, there does seem to be a problem with some 1394 drives. I can render, capture (with SCLive), and output rendered files okay with them, but cannot play the timeline reliably. Lots of lockups (which VV3 erroneously reports as an audio error).

This is with several different programs on both Win2k and WinXP. Only regularity I've noticed is the trouble drives all have the newer Oxford chipsets - our older slower drives work fine.

P.S.: Forget pre-rendering entirely. VV3 just doesn't do it well. Just render and delete the originals.
dpvollmer wrote on 10/9/2002, 7:40 PM
I, too, have had problems playing the timeline but have received no error messages - just several seconds of waiting until I can resume again. It seems to get better as I continue editing.

How do I know if I have the Oxford chipset in my firewire drives? Or, maybe a better question would be, which firewire drives will work with VV and other programs reliably?

When you say, "just render and delete the originals", I understand the render part but what do you mean by "delete the originals"?

Thanks for your help.
David Vollmer
mathiaslink wrote on 10/9/2002, 10:00 PM
Ah, that's some info I've been after--USB 2.0 drives work okay for projects?
DGates wrote on 10/10/2002, 2:59 AM
My Maxtor FireWire's finicky, and only captures 17 minutes at a time. Switch to my hard drive, and I can capture as much as my disk allows. But I just slightly overlap the footage, and trim it exactly once inside. I've only used the Maxtor to edit with Pinnacle Studio, which doesn't really cause any problems with playback or printing to tape. So you've got me alittle worried about using it with Vegas. But I did just install a second 80 GB slave drive inside my system, so I guess I'll keep all the video on those, and non-video stuff on the firewire.
Finster wrote on 10/10/2002, 8:42 AM
I've got an older Maxtor 5400rpm external firewire drive and Maxtor 1394 card and can't say I've ever had any trouble that I would blame on the drive.
kkolbo wrote on 10/10/2002, 9:43 AM
I have been using my firewire drive from Que on a celeron laptop and two different desktops, a P3 450 and a P4 2ghz without any problem. I capture, render and print from it. The one problem was that I can not have the material on the drive and also use an external monitor connected to the same controller card. I fixed that by putting the monitor on a second firewire card.

K
DanielH wrote on 10/10/2002, 11:19 AM
Yes, an ION 30gig USB drive with there card slot adapter for the Toshiba, works great. I even use it to capture live from the camera, using the tape as a backup to the captured footage. I have captured up to an hour without a problem.

Dan
stateofgracie wrote on 10/10/2002, 3:46 PM
also look at this thread:
http://www.sonicfoundry.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=117087&Page=0

(or search for the 'Firewire HD trouble' subject line)

look at SonicEPM's posts there.
Control_Z wrote on 10/10/2002, 4:43 PM
There's no way I know of to tell which chipset your drive uses. Anything less than a year old is probably the newer set.

'Delete the originals' simply means that once you're finished editing part of a project, you can render it and delete all the captures that make it up. Gotta do it with limited drive space - free up room to capture more.