Firewire HD trouble

Carel wrote on 8/14/2002, 3:36 PM
I got a brand new P4 2.2GHz laptop with 40GB Internal HD and a 120GB firewire HD. Running under XP Pro and VV 3.0c. The Firewire HD captures just fine: even with the camera daisy-chained NO dropped frames.

When I have a bunch of clips together on the timeline I get an error message at seemingly random intervals during playback: "An error occurred while starting playback unable to mix audio. The operation timed out." All audio tracks are stereo.

I got this 2.2Ghz laptop just for editing and would hate to have to send it back. Is there any way to get things to work with a firewire HD?

Comments

SonyEPM wrote on 8/14/2002, 4:07 PM
This error does pop up from time to time, primarily with 1394 drives, and it has been very difficult for us to track down. We are aware of the problem. The next version of Vegas should fix it, but for now there is not much we can do (sorry).
Carel wrote on 8/14/2002, 4:20 PM
Would it help if I switched to a USB 2 HD? I would hate to have to give up on the laptop setup, so any tips on how to make this work will help.
Clyde200 wrote on 8/14/2002, 4:23 PM
This happens to me from time to time with my firewire drive. Seems random. Though defraging the drive seems to help... but not always.
salad wrote on 8/14/2002, 5:24 PM
If you are interested in reading a little more on this error, click SEARCH (above), and type in: Audio Operation Timed Out.
It is very interesting reading. The Acid forum in general, is pretty entertaining to read. Yes, Acid users are having (halucinations?) this error pop up as well.
So far, the error seems ONLY to manifest in the W2k & XP OS's.
There seems a different solution in each case where the error stops occuring.
To try ALL the different solutions........???

Let us know if you find a solution that worked for YOU!
Shredder wrote on 8/14/2002, 6:37 PM
Anyone who's having this issue, can you check the following:

On Win2K, go to Start..Run & type 'eventvwr' & see if you have any errors in your system log from Source 'disk' - I periodically get a bunch of EventID 11 "The drive detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk..."

Sometimes I get 100s of these IN ONE SECOND! Often these occur when I right click on a large >1GB file on that drive in the windows explorer, explorer will hang.

I have a maxtor 80GB 5400 external, and periodically I hear what sounds like the head snapping into park. That's another time when I get these errors.

I think I'm using either a pyro card or a pinnacle DV500? (their old cheap 1394 card) -- I have both, not sure which one's in my pc right now, too lazy to check.

I called maxtor about it & they were absolutely no help. I haven't had any data loss & this has been happening for over a year now (but I'm sure it's still not a good thing)

I wonder if this might be related you your issue.

- Jon
John_Cline wrote on 8/14/2002, 10:28 PM
Minor correction: The DV200 was Pinnacle's inexpensive Firewire card.

The DV500 is a real-time, dual-stream DV card which has been incompatible with both Vegas Video and external Firewire drives. However, Pinnacle is set to release drivers which will finally cure both of these incompatabilities.

DV500 owners have always been able to choose not to install the Pinnacle supplied drivers and install the standard Microsoft 1394 drivers instead for use with other software like Vegas and use Firewire hard drives, but this disabled the real-time features and the analog I/O of the DV500. The new drivers will allow full use of the DV500 features in Premiere, while also allowing use of the DV500 in Vegas just like it was a standard Firewire card. I suspect Sonic Foundry will see a small spike in Vegas sales as DV500 owners will now easily be able to run it.

John
fanningp wrote on 8/14/2002, 10:40 PM
What a coincidence...just tonight I had this problem editing my first digital transfer from my Sony TRV27.

My event log has this interesting entry:

An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging operation.

I have a Western Digital 120g external Firewire drive. Yes, defragging DOES sometimes help, but in my case today, it did not.

Pete
Cheesehole wrote on 8/14/2002, 11:19 PM
wow this is all kind of depressing! I haven't got a firewire drive yet, and I've seen all the event log entries mentioned, but *only* when there was a serious problem with my drive. example, if I kick out the scsi cable. for a long time I was running on an underpowered powersupply and I would get lots of disk errors but they all vanished as soon as I fixed the power problem.

somehow these firewire cables seem pretty flimsy compared to an 80 conductor ide cable or a scsi cable. do firewire drives come with better cables?
salad wrote on 8/15/2002, 12:23 PM
The cable that came with my FireVue box looks very heavy duty. It also has an LED on one end to confirm proper connection. I believe the bridge brd and cable are made by Granite...

pat
jerryd wrote on 8/15/2002, 12:36 PM
I think there are inherent problems with firewire and all NT based systems. I had a Que M3 firwire harddrive that played video files perfectly on a win 98 computer, but would not play the files on a win 2000 machine with same Pyro firwire card.
SonyEPM wrote on 8/15/2002, 2:05 PM
Many people claim to use 1394 drives without any problems, so the "...operation timeout..." error isn't a 100% repro on every machine, but we are looking at it closely. ACID4 (still in beta as of this minute) has some engine changes that appear to have resolved this problem. If all is well, these changes will migrate into Vegas.

If you use a SCSI or IDE drive, your chances of seeing this are MUCH smaller. I typically don't use FW drives on my work machine, never see it.
salad wrote on 8/15/2002, 2:21 PM
If a FW HD is on your shopping list, I wouldn't worry too much about this. They still have their merit. I since moved some video back over to mine and am not getting any errors. I'm having much success sharing the drive between 2 PC's, as long as only one PC is connected at a time. However, I still like the idea of having this new 8MB bffr 120GB WD as an internal multimedia drive..........for now :-)

pat
rmack350 wrote on 9/18/2002, 8:34 PM
I also see the problem but am able to mute the audio and the problem goes away. Most people won't be able to do this.

I've wondered if it is the size of the file? maybe limiting the capture sizes to smaller files would help. I capture an entire tape without device control and set the file sizes at 2GB.

Another possiblility could be bad bridge cards in the enclosure? Maybe the error always happens at certain file offsets-like the end of the drive's cache?

I have no problem with this from the internal IDE drive.

Rob Mack
ramallo wrote on 9/18/2002, 9:06 PM
Hello,

I have the same problem of Carel.

My steps

- I tried with a lot of FW cables.

- I tried with a different drives (I have a Lacie Studio drive, but I tried with a no brand Oxford 911 IBM 60 GXP).

- I tried with Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

- I tried with diferent sound cards (In-built Crystal, RME Hamerfall DSP, Sound Devices USBPre)

- I tried with different FW cards (I have a laptop with in-built FW, I tried with a Pyro cardbus)

But after the different tests, the problem are the same.

Another test

- I tried with Nuendo and I can open 55 tracks (Audio) with the Lacie Studio Drive without any issue at the moment (6 months of test). I tried too with the Windows Movie Maker without any issue.

Conclussion:

- Fails the SF audio engine (BUG).

Regards

Carel wrote on 9/18/2002, 9:53 PM
My solution was to drop the HD into a USB-2 box. No more problems. Next experiment will be to use the USB-2 as source and a FW drive to render to.