Gliches during playback
 

I'm using a aplle G4 dual processer and Lacie hard drives Canon GL2 and JVCplayback deck and Final Cut Express) During playback I get gliches and or dropped audio wich shows up on my final product. If I watch it again on the computer it may or may not show up. This is what baffles me! We can watch it 3 or 4 times and all looks good then the next time it shows a glich. Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you
John

I assume you mean you have external, FireWire Lacie Hard Drives.... is that correct? Is that where your project is stored?

Sorry I was out of town, but yes it's on the external hard drives

This sounds like the classic case of drives which aren't fast enough. It could also be related to how things are connected via firewire. I know that many people like the LaCie drives, but I have no personal experience with them. I will say however that I've seen a lot of posts like this where the common thread is that someone was using a LaCie drive, often their "big disk." I have no idea whether that's significant or not, but it does make me wonder....

How fast are your drives? In my experience you need at least 7200 RPM and a fast chipset like Oxford 911. Are you using firewire 400 or 800 (assuming 400 since it sounds like you have an older machine)? How many drives and other firewire devices are connected to your computer at the same time? Are they on separate ports?

Personally, I have four Maxtor 160 GB external FW 400 drives, a Western Digital 100 GB, a Seagate 500 GB and a few others, and they all work fine for capturing and playing DV with FCP. All these are 7200 RPM drives. I tried using a 5400 RPM drive before and it wouldn't work. Also had problems with a 7200 RPM drive which had a slower chipset. I'm using a 1.25 ghz G4 single processor tower. Generally speaking, I only have one firewire disk connected at a time using one FW 400 port, and either my camera or DVD recorder is connected to the other FW 400 port.

Boyd I have two Lacie one going to the other 160gb and a 200gb 7500rpm and then a jvc deck both are 400 FW.

Try rearranging the order in which your FW devices are connected. The LaCie drives are plenty fast enough for DV material. I use one on my iBook G3 800 with no problems as well as a LaCie Superdrive. I did, however, have to find the right order in which to connect them before I got proper results. I'm out of town right now so I can't confirm the order but try putting your main capture drive first in line and the deck last.

The LaCie drives should be fast enough but remember that all the devices on a Firewire port must share its bandwidth. If, for example, you are playing video from a Firewire disk out through a Canopus AD/DA device on the same bus you are likely to get hiccups. It is best to have your capture drive and playback drive internal to the machine. You might try copying the file in question to an internal drive (preferrably no the system drive) and playing back from that drive. Another alternative is to buy an additional fire wire card and make sure that potentially contending devices are on different busses.