FCP5 Crashes when trying to capture HDV using AIC, please help!
 

Hi people,

OK ive been capturing a lot of footage (shot in HDV using an HVR-A1E) and ive captured approx. 300gb of the stuff (im making a DVD of the Summer's BikeTrials riding here in the UK). Ive had no problems, the workflow has been effortless until last night. Was going great until half way through capturing a clip FCP decides to totally freeze during capturing - so the video window freezes and you cant click on anything within FCP. I automatically think, ok, it must be cos Ive had the computer (PowerMac G5 Quad, 2.5gb RAM) on all evening, so I restart it, but it makes no difference, it just keeps crashing when I try and capture. I tried starting a new project (as the 300gb of footage is located within one project - neatly organised within Bins though) hoping this will solve it, but nothing. Sometimes FCP will seem to capture ok, however after capturing the footage doesnt seem to write to the hard drive properly (it wont open/import into FCP and it doesnt play in QuickTime).

I did think whether RAM was the issue, but I looked at the activity monitor and barely any of my 2.5gb was being used up (this was when FCP froze) and only one core of 4 was 100% being used. So Ive really no idea whats happening!

Im totally stuck with this. Ive got another 100gb or so to capture before I start actually editing, so any help would be much appreciated.

Many thanks in advance!

If it's crashing on the same section of footage then there is something amiss with the recording. Skip that area and see if the problem reoccurs.

Are your drives in good shape? Perhaps the data is very fragmented. If you have a program like TechTool you'll be able to find out. Also don't capture AIC to the system boot drive, the data stream might be too high.

OS X is very picky about ram. Did you install your own ram? If so, what brand?

Your system drive should be formatted with journaling OFF. If it's on, check in Disk Utility, you can turn it off with Cocktail. Do a google for OS X Cocktail.

Same with your media drives. Also with your media drives, select it in the finder and control click it to get info and at the bottom make sure "Ignore Ownership" is checked.

I beg to differ here. Since the OS 10.3.x days, Apple recommends _all_ users to format their drives in HFS+ journaled. You'll appreciate this during your first hard crash (i.e. bringing your whole system down). The journaled FS is able to revert to the last stable version of the directory structure, standard HFS+ is not. Especially relevant if you're filling your drives to more than 85% capacity (which you shouldn't).

I have Crucial RAM, installed it myself, never had a problem with it.

The footage was fine as well and all I did in the end was replace the firewire cable linking my external drive to the computer with a USB2 cable and it worked fine. I think the cable, therefore, was to blame! I think it was quite old too so theres that one solved!

Many thanks for your help/advise! Much appreciated.