Final Cut Pro 6 and Disk Errors
 

Hello -

I've encountered a strange happening when editing the video with Final Cut Pro (version 6.06). A couple of times yesterday, when editing a Standard Definition video, my "workhorse" hard disk drive was showing that it had some minor errors that needed to get fixed when I used the Disk Utility program. The repairs were quickly fixed, thankfully. But it happened TWICE yesterday.

I have an older Mac Pro computer, purchased 2+ years ago. It has the original system drive. However, a few months ago, I "upgraded" the three other hard disk drives to 1 TB's. All three drives are SATA WD Cavalier Black drives by Western Digital with 32 MB cache.

My Intel-Mac computer: Xeon 2.66 (Quad); 8 GB's RAM; 4 Hard Disk Drives, 1st = 250 GB's, the other three are 1 TB's in size; MOTU 2408 MK3 audio for audio; NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT for video. I'm still using the Leopard 10.5.8 operating system.

To give a brief description of my drives, Drive 1, of course, is the system drive; drive 2 is my instrumental software drive where I house various instrumental libraries; drive 3 tends to be my "project drive" where I put audio and video files to be edited; and drive 4 (at present) is my rendering/cache drive. With regards to Final Cut Pro, I've designated the 4th drive to do the temporary rendered and cache files.

To give a brief description of what's going on, basically I noticed that the temporary rendering process was acting kind of sluggish when using Final Cut Pro. So, I activated the Disk Utility program which I then found out that Drive 3 had some "minor errors" that needed repair. (Unfortunately, I don't remember the exact nature of the error, but it had something to do with head file name of the drive, or something like that.) Again, this happened TWICE yesterday.

One of the things that I was doing yesterday was going in and out of the LIVE TYPE program, which I use to create titles. I'd create and render a 10 or 15 second title then go right into Final Cut Pro and add those newly created files to the sequence.

By the way, I use the Standard Definition QuickTime files during the recording and editing process.

One more thing to add. This problem is not new. I've had "minor" disk errors in the past with older drives and "older" versions of Leopard. In fact, I lost the original Drive 3 (and a whole lot of unbacked-up projects). I think that drive was just old. But I did receive the occasional and similar disk errors on that drive.

Finally. . . with the exception of not purchasing the Final Cut Studio upgrade and the upgrade to Snow Leopard yet, everything is updated. This includes the QuickTime program and all support programs for the "Pro Applications".

Any ideas to what may be happening? Is there anything that I should be doing to help prevent these "minor disk errors"?? Although I've been doing this for a long time as a hobbyist, I am NOT an expert video recorder/editor.

Thank you in advance for your time and thoughtful comments/suggestions.

Ted

Ed,

What you need to do is start using a regular disk-maintenance routine that keeps thinks like this in check and will fix problems before the become major issues.

Pick up a copy of DiskWarrior; this a must-have for *any* Mac user, not just pro users. DW is capable often fixing what would otherwise be unrecoverable errors and most of the time can resurrect a disk that even Disk Utility can't.

Another app that is worth it's salt is Onyx, which handles the more low-end but very much needed regular maintenance routines.

Get both these apps on your machine and you should be back in business in no time.

How full is your drive? I get disc errors if I have less than 10% of capacity left.

Otherwise I agree with Robert. Except that I use the built-in Disc Utility and the First Aid tab to Repair Disc. If Disc Utility can't repair it, I know that something MAJOR is wrong with the disc and that I should run Disc Warrior and get it repaired ASAP.

When ever you're dealing with large amounts of data, at high transfer speeds, you need to stay on top of disc maintenance.

One last thing......get a UPS for your system. Without it, if you were to loose power while the computer was writing to a drive, you'll corrupt the entire drive. Not good. A UPS will prevent this from happening. Cheap insurance. (of course a backup drive is also a good idea)

Mitchell and Robert -

Thank you both for your thoughtful responses.

I did purchase Disk Warrior as suggested. Actually, this program seems HIGHLY recommended because another person on Apple Discussion bulletin board suggested it as well.

Disk Warrior seemed to indicate that the actual drive was o.k.; that it was functioning normally. There were 3 "corrupt" audio files (that I didn't know were corrupt) that I used for the particular video project that I'm working on. These files were found by Disk Warrior and repaired. All seems good. I wonder if it were these three audio files that might have caused the problem with with the hard disk???

Of note, these three audio files were "re-formatted" from ".wav" files to ".aif" files. In addition, I converted the sample rate from 44100 to 48000. I also renamed these files. I did all of this using the Peak Pro 6 program. I wonder if doing all of these changes caused the problem with the files???

Anyway. . . all is good. After the file repair and disk drive optimization using Disk Warrior, the video project is working just fine with Final Cut Pro. Actually, the Final Cut Pro seems to be responding more quickly now!! This is good!!

Finally, I backed-up the drive. It's a relatively new drive with very little projects on it yet. It shouldn't be giving me problems!! However, I have another drive just in case this one dies.

I haven't purchased a UPS yet. It's on my list of things to do, though!

Again. . . thank you for the thoughtful suggestions and insight into my problem.

Ted

From my knowledge if you lose power to a SATA drive the majority of it should stay intact, except for any files open / un saved / creating.

However i would still recommend a UPS. There are some very cool ones that can go as far as txting mobiles and properly shutting down any connected workstations....