[curious4me2]

I own a iMac DV SE 500 Mhz Graphite G3. I have 512 megs of RAM installed. It came with a 30 Gig internal hard drive. I like video editing using iMovie, but I quickly ran out of room on my internal hard drive. I am running 10.3.2

I just purchased an external Western Digital 7200 RPM 120 Gig Firewire/USB 2.0 Combo Hard drive. I figured that it would give me enough room to do what I want to do with editing (especially since on the box it's advertised as being good for editing digital video).

I partitioned it into two partitions, one 70 Gigs and the other 40 gigs. Then I opened iMovie and attempted to use it with the new hard drive. While playing the tape back, it's all smooth, but once I hit "import" the video gets all jumpy. I thought, "okay, maybe that's just what it's doing now and it won't show up on playback." Well, no, once I imported it, I edited a little experiment, I exported it to a short quicktime movie and saved it to my internal drive. Still jumpy. Okay, so next I tried exporting the finished short edited iMovie digital video straight from the external hard drive and to the camera. Once it was done, I played it back on the camera. Still jumpy. It's as if the footage is slowing down while transferring from source to external hard drive at certain points and this is showing up in every stage. Is there any way I can correct this? This never happened with my internal drive and my video camera.

Also, when partitioning there is a checkbox that says: Locked for editing.
What does that mean?

Any help would be appreciated, i would hate think I got this hard drive and won't be able to use it the way I want to.


Thanks.

[Uncle Skeleton]

maybe the drive is bad. did it come with any diagnostic tools (or do you have any)?

[curious4me2]

No, it did not come with any tools or software. It was formatted out of the box and came with a power supply, firewire cable, usb cable and a installation sheet. It recommended I reinitialize the disk for better performance, which I did. As far as disk utilities, I have what comes with Panther.

[Axo1ot1]

Sounds like the jumper settings aren't correct. Make sure the hard drive is set to cable select (CS).

[curious4me2]

"Sounds like the jumper settings aren't correct. Make sure the hard drive is set to cable select (CS)."

Hmm... how do I do this? There are no switches on the hard drive. The Quick Install sheet basically says to hook up the firewire cable and it will auto detect whether you are using firewire or USB and it says not to use both at the same time. It has two firewire ports on the back and one USB port. I have used it with either port and the results are the same. Whenever I go to import in iMovie, it flutters ever few seconds and then plays okay, then flutters, then okay, etc. Then when I play back the clip I just imported, it jumps and skips where it was fluttering. When I am importing, I can see the red activity light on the hard drive lighting and flickering as if transferring information.

This is what my system information has to say about it:

FireWire Bus:

Speed: 400 Mb/sec Speed

FireWire/USB2.0:

Capacity: 111.79 GB
Manufacturer: WDC
Model: FireWire/USB2.0
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: Yes
BSD Name: disk1
OS9 Drivers: Yes
Speed: 400 Mb/sec Speed
Unit Spec Id: 24734
Firmware Revision: 4.17
Unit Software Version: 10483

Batman:

Capacity: 71.91 GB
Available: 71.72 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: HFS+
BSD Name: disk1s10
Mount Point: /Volumes/Batman

Robin:

Capacity: 39.63 GB
Available: 39.6 GB
Writable: Yes
File System: HFS+
BSD Name: disk1s12
Mount Point: /Volumes/Robin

DCR-TRV240:

Manufacturer: Sony
Model: DCR-TRV240
Unit Spec Id: 41005
Speed: 100 Mb/sec Speed
Unit Software Version: 10001

Thanks.

[direktor]

You have this drive connected via firewire right? Not USB?

[curious4me2]

Yes, I have it connected via firewire. I have looked on Western Digital's website and they say this:

"Problem:
Capturing digital video from a DV camera directly to an external drive results in poor capture performance and dropped frames.

Cause:
Individual system limitations as well as inherent limits to the current implementation of external drives often cause this problem. For example, an older system with 400MHZ processor and 64MB of RAM simply cannot provide the same performance as a newer 1.6GHZ system with 512MB of RAM.

Resolution:
Make sure that your system is configured for top performance. This includes shutting down any unnecessary applications and utilities and defragmenting the hard drive.


Differences in drivers and the chipsets used for the FireWire controller play a role as well. Always make sure that you have the latest drivers and relevant operating system updates for the external drive installed.


In most cases, it is best to capture video directly to the internal EIDE drive rather than to the external drive. This is because with many systems the FireWire bus is not able to process the digital video from the camera and write it to the external drive without experiencing some lost frames."


So, what am I to do? What am I left with? Using my 30 gig hard drive to import and edit with? What good is having the 120 Gig hard drive for DV editing?
Because if I do that then transfer the footage to the 120 hard drive, is it still going to lose quality and then what about exporting it back to tape? Bleah...

[k_munic]

Originally posted by curious4me2:
…
So, what am I to do? What am I left with? Using my 30 gig hard drive to import and edit with? What good is having the 120 Gig hard drive for DV editing?
Because if I do that then transfer the footage to the 120 hard drive, is it still going to lose quality and then what about exporting it back to tape? Bleah...

you have chance!

imagine:
via the one firwire bus, there comes the datas from your camera, the internal bus chip says "hello! that's for the external hd! back again into this thin wire firewire!!" - and there is lots of traffic! so the problem is not your extrenal hd, but the management of dats within one single firewire-card.

solution:
capture your footage on your internal hd.
exort your datas on the external hd - this is LOSSLESS!, because it's just 1 and 0...- you can do this a hundred times withou loosing quality!

tell imovie where to find the datas.

now, your project is maybe a little shakey in display, but when you finallay burn it/export it on .dv everything is fine!

[Uncle Skeleton]

I still say people capture and edit DV on firewire disks all the time, and you either have bad hardware or you are some kind of OCD perfectionist and you notice problems that normal people can't detect. How fast a sustained transfer can you get to and from this drive, just copying large files?

PS, to change the jumpers you have to open up the case and look at where the internal IDE cable connects to the drive from the firewire bridge. Chances are it will void your warranty if you don't do it very carefully so it's not detectible

[direktor]

Of course. I capture and edit off of (20+) FW drives all day long for work, and never drop frames. I've noticed one thing...FW drives give better transfer rates on faster computers...so it is possible the machine is too slow to use a FW drive in this capacity.

But I've also had a few drives here and there that got slow suddenly for no reason at all...which I would return under warranty and then be fine after that.

I'd try another make of FW drive to see what happens...and if this behavior repeats, then you may be out of luck on that iMac.

[curious4me2]

Even the most blind imperfectionist would see the problems that I am having with this importing of video, they're that apparent. I mean, when I am importing there is fluttering you can see and hear, it's similar to a reel to reel movie about to come off the spools and then after it's imported, when I play the clip I just imported back, the part where it fluttered, it skips, so you get dropped frames and sound. It's like listening to a bad phone connection where you only get half the syllables in each word. It's quite evident. Otherwise, the hard drive seems to work fine. I can transfer files to it and retrieve them, I can run applications I have transferred to it off it. I am starting to fear that there is nothing really wrong with it but that the transfer rate isn't fast enough to keep up with the writing to the disk. Or something like that. Anyway...

Thanks for the help so far. Any more suggestions?

[curious4me2]

Well, I just tried importing a fresh couple of clips to the internal hard drive and then I copied that file to the external hard drive. Then I opened the file on the external hard drive, edited it a little and saved it to the external hard drive. Then I copied it back to the internal hard drive and played it back. There was no visible skipping or fluttering. I guess this is what I am going to have to do. I will probably have to clear up space on my internal by moving it to the external, then import to the internal, copy to the external, do my editing there and then copy it back before exporting it to camera. Oh well.. if there are any other suggestions, let me know.

Thanks.

[Uncle Skeleton]

I didn't ask if it worked at all. I asked if it worked at anything close to 400 Mbps. Copy 20 GB or so to the drive, in as large of files as possible, and calculate the transfer rate.

PS, I used to do DV capturing to a 5400 rpm firewire drive on my 400 mhz pismo with no obvious problems. I really doubt a 500 mhz iMac is too slow, unless its firewire port was intentionally crippled for some reason (or you're running some heavy server or something in the background, or Word is taking half your cpu to spell check or something)

[curious4me2]

Well, I tried to transfer a few files and they took extremely long to copy. So, I took it back to CompUSA for a refund and now I will save the money for a new Mac.

Thanks for your help.