Anyone experience severe delays with Firewire HDs & FCP ?

[jmeccia]

I have a Powermac G4 with two IEEE firewire ports. So, normally I have my DV capture device and a portable 120GB firewire drive plugged into them at the same time. I've been doing some heavy editing on this system like this for months now and only till recently have I experienced some serious drag, or delay when trying to access info from the firewire drive. The HD is rather new, so if it's the HD it should be under warrantee. Anyway, I notice if I try to startup FCE with the HD powered up and plugged in, it take at least 5-10 minutes to load!!!

Any suggestions? Is it my firewire port? the HD? ??

Thanks

 

[crazytom]

There could be a number of things going on. First, if you have a large project with a lot of edit/transitions/renderings/etc, it takes some time for FCP to load that in and prepare it for viewing. Second, if your HD is getting very full, some of the files may be fragmented so it takes the HD some extra time to find all the pieces. Lastly, if you have your camera plugged in and on, that ~could~ have an effect on the whole works depending on the camera. I've found that I can't use a FW HD with a Canon camera, but it works fine with a Sony camera.

So, if it's a big project, there's probably not much you can do to speed things up unless you pull that drive from the FW case and install it inside your G4 (I'm assuming that the HD is 7200rpm).

If your HD is full, or near full, and you have something like Disk Warrior, you could defrag it, but you should backup your HD before you do it to be safe----which, with a 120GB HD isn't always practical...

Lastly, you could try booting your machine without the camera plugged in....again, depending on the camera, it may or may not make a difference.

The only other tidbit I could offer would be to check your FCE preferences and select another drive for Audio and Video renders, that would free up some bandwidth from the FW HD.

Hope this helps....