Help - AVCIntra transferring at snail's pace
 

Hi Folks -

At my wit's end here, hope someone can help:

A client has asked me to copy about 250 gigs of Intra P2 footage on to an external drive.

As I've only done the P2 workflow with DVCpro, I shot a 30 second test clip (about 300MB) and connected our HPX3000 to our Mac via the USB device mode.

This tiny 300MB cllip took 13 MINUTES to transfer. This seems several times slower than it should take, and at this rate it'll take me all week to transfer 250 gigs.

I tried using our P2 store as a card reader, and the transfer rate is equally slow. I tried copying to a different external drive - same transfer speed.

I'm using a G5 desktop with 2.2 ghz of ram. Is it because I don't have an Intel Mac that this is taking so long? I doubt it, as I've done this exact P2 workflow with this computer and had no problems - the INTRA format is the only new variable, and I know it's not supposed to take 50 times longer.

We don't have Final Cut 6 so I brought the test clip to a friends computer and he was able to see it in the FCP log and transfer window. So the transfer IS working, it's just working at an obscenely slow pace.

I'm definitely a P2 novice so hopefully I've explained this problem properly. Anyone have any ideas?

So I took the P2 store ith the same 30 second clip home to my Intel iMac. The clip that took 13 minutes to transfer at work took less than ten seconds at home.

So was that the problem? AVCIntra is that much slower on a non-Intel Mac?

Elementary, my dear Watson. It is your USB port. G5 comes with only USB 1.1 (rated at 11 Mbits/sec). The later Apples are equipped with USB 2.0 (rated at 480 Mbits/sec). So, you see the difference in transfer speed?

Nothing to do with AVC-Intra codec at all. You are just copying bits and bytes from one medium to another.