When Final Cut Pro didn’t cut it…

I finally took time last night to dump two hours of video onto the MDD PowerMac from my Sony TRV-720 camcorder. But what I thought would be a two hour job took about five, the only saving grace being that I could work on my website using one of my other machines while the MDD was cranking away. Still, one of the things I don’t like about Final Cut Pro is how it captures. If something happens before the capture is complete, all video already dumped onto the machine appears lost. (That may be because I haven’t figured out a way to recover it.) So, last night, when I tried twice to some one hour tapes and they both hung at the very end, I was not a happy camper. Hours of work down the drain… (NOTE TO APPLE: If there isn’t a way to recover files from a crashed or hung FCP capture, MAKE one!)

If you drop by Apple’s support forums, you’ll find a fair number of folks having problems capturing using Final Cut Pro 4. (FCP 4 is what I’m using. I never saw any capturing problems using FCP 3.0 nor have I seen any when running Final Cut Express on my older PowerMac.) FCP 4 capture problems with a solution were associated with having Norton Anti-Virus on the machine, and I have been careful not to install any Norton product on the MDD because of how they tended to enmesh themselves in its operating system. So, whatever was happening with mine had to be some kind of a bug in FCP, OS X, or in the machine itself.

To troubleshoot the problem, I asked myself what had changed since I had performed a successful capture and identified two things. I had changed my hard drive configuration and had updated the OS from 10.2.6 to 10.2.8. While the operating system update certainly was suspect, the only way to drop back to the older version of OS X was to reinstall from scratch. I decided to pursue reinstalling the operating system only as a last resort after eliminating all possible hard disk problems.

To look at the hardware, I booted the machine using a Drive 10 CD and then ran hardware checks on each hard disk. Drive 10 found no problems. I then booted the machine using its Software Recovery DVD, ran Apple’s Disk Utility and repaired permissions on the boot drive. After that was done, I performed a normal boot into OS 10.2.8.

Unlike IDE set ups in a PC, the primary and secondary hard disk IDE ports in the MDD do not run at the same ATA speeds. The primary IDE interface is ATA100 and the secondary is ATA66. Kind of ridiculous if you ask me, but that’s the way it is. So, could that be causing some problem with capturing in FCP? To find out, in FCP’s System Preferences, I deselected all hard drives and then set the hard disks on the primary IDE (ATA 100) interface as the only scratch disks within FCP. I then tried a 30 second capture. It worked. A ten minute capture also worked, as did a fifteen. After following that with a 30 minute capture that had no problems, I declared the problem fixed, at least for now.

Obviously, I still don’t really know if the problem is due to the split-speed ATA interface or whether there is some issue with one of the remaining 120GB hard disks (one is a Maxtor and one is a Western Digital). I may try capturing tonight with one or the other of them selected. I may not. If I ever do find out it that the split interface is the cause, I could try using a PCI based card to put all drives on ATA 100 or even ATA 133. My experience with those cards in PC’s, though, says they’re often as much trouble as they’re worth; so, it’s unlikely I’m going to go there. I prefer to just use the 160GB hard disks as capture disks and use the remaining 120’s to archive stuff.