Large REDCINE X Project Crashing....

[Aaron Hucker]

Thanks for the input...

Just for the record (although I guess I should have stated it before) I am very aware this is BETA, however, that doesn't mean I should sit back and think that I am asking anything out of what I would consider 'ordinary' for a program of this nature. And as Nick pointed out, data rates are going to be higher, so the demands on the program/cpu/memory are going to be higher.

As requested, here are the specs of my machine.
OSX 10.5.8
2x 3.2 GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon
8 GB 800 MHz DDR2 RAM
2TB OWC MERCURY ELITE PRO FIREWIRE RAID.

Here is a step by step on how this all came about, just incase others try to re-create this.

1. Load individual folders of footage into Bin 1 (Each folder represents a day of shooting) Making all of my footage in Bin 1.
2. Save Project.
3. Close RCX.
4.Open RCX and Open Project.
5. Drop any clip in Player and start grading
6. Crash.

Anyone from RED have any insight to this?

Thanks.

[joe hedge]

Quite possibly it's the drive itself. You're saying you've got 1.7 TB of R3D's on a 2TB drive. Formatting that drive takes up about 140 gigs, so your drive capacity is actually 1.86 TB. The standard rule of thumb is to leave the drive with about 20% of empty space, otherwise you risk drive failure. Which means your 2 TB drive is really only good for about 1.5/1.6 TB of storage before you start running into potential performance issues.

Also is it a brand new, previously unused drive, and if not, did you reformat it before using it for your current project, or just delete what was previously on it?

Finally there is the issue of how the R3D's were transferred onto the drive in the first place. I always transcode from drives whose R3D's were pulled directly from the camera drives/CF cards with dedicated software like ShotPut Pro or R3D Data Manager, I never just "drag and drop" R3D's.

Sorry if this all sounds off topic or condescending, but having 1.7 TB on a 2 TB drive is a red flag that says there's basic data management issues you may not be aware of.

[joe hedge]

As requested, here are the specs of my machine.
OSX 10.5.8
2x 3.2 GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon
8 GB 800 MHz DDR2 RAM
2TB OWC MERCURY ELITE PRO FIREWIRE RAID.

Another big no-no in my opinion is using RAID 0 for backing up R3D's. The whole idea behind backing up is having everything on physically separate drives so that if one fails, the other is still good. With RAID 0, if one of those 2 raided-together drives inside that enclosure fails, you lose everything on both drives, effectively doubling the chances of failure. RAID 0 is the opposite of what you want for backing files up, it's really for editing bandwidth, not security. And since it's FireWire 800 anyway, it's redundant, because it's not going to go any faster than FW 800 does.

[Aaron Hucker]

I understand it may be a full drive issue, it is something I'll look into.
The drive was brand new, and freshly formatted for the project. The R3D's are exact duplicates of the original ones on the RED DRIVE.

As for the backup comment... I never mentioned that I had only one copy of the R3D's and they were on a RAID 0, so wherever you are drawing these conclusions from is beyond me, but you can refrain if you don't mind staying on topic.

Joe, I appreciate if you're are sincerely trying to help, but this isn't a question of wether or not I understand the concept of R3D data management, I have been working with Our RED ONE and ALL of its files since May 2008, I think it's safe for me to say I understand how our files work in MY work environment. However, I do not quite fully understand the problems I am encountering with a NEW piece of Beta software.

I'll continue to run tests on what amounts work, and, in the meantime I'll believe that I am doing us all a favor but pushing RCX to the limits with the amount of footage I am placing in it on external drives, because I wont be the only person who's expecting this to be possible.

[joe hedge]

I never mentioned that I had only one copy of the R3D's and they were on a RAID 0, so wherever you are drawing these conclusions from is beyond me, but you can refrain if you don't mind staying on topic.

And I never said that you only had one copy. The conclusion is drawn from the fact that the drive is a "2TB OWC MERCURY ELITE PRO FIREWIRE RAID", so you're formatted to either RAID 0 or RAID 1, and 1.7 TB wouldn't fit if it was RAID 1, hence RAID 0. And I am staying on topic - the topic is "Large REDCINE X Project Crashing....", and the reason you're crashing is probably the drive.

[Deanan]

Best thing to do is to turn on verbose logging, load the project and then please send us the log file.

[Aaron Hucker]

Will do, thank you Deanan!