Thanks for the input....listen.... I value your opinions or I wouldn't have asked for them. You and Blkdog have helped me numerous times in the past, and reading these forums has provided much assistance to me over the years. If you think that it's worth the effort and recommend an upgrade to MC2.8 over XP 5.8....that weighs heavily in pointing me in that direction. It's just that it wasn't all that clear in your previous post. I'm a "small-fry" and can't afford a lot of downtime, I don't have a staff to help when things are down and I have to do all the trouble shooting on my own, so I hope you can understand my hesitation/frustration. I've been a regular visitor to the Xpress Pro Mac forum (especially to gather information about upgrading to XP 5.8) and this problem never caught my eye over there. When Avid made the announcement last week, I immediately started visiting this forum to acquaint myself with some of the issues people are having, and given that this is a long thread dating back over a year through numerous versions with quite a few people experiencing the same problem, it understandably caught my attention. It seemed pretty significant to me....maybe I'm wrong. All that being said....will the age of my PPC Dual 2 G5 be an issue? What can I do (short of buying a new workstation) that I haven't done to help maximize performance and minimize some of the problems when I move to MC 2.8 ?

Amen. The sky is not falling here.

I can see how my previous post wasn't clear... my bad. Bus Errors are an issue, but I highly doubt it'll significantly impact your workflow.

Now your dual 2 G5 could be an issue.  To be honest, I would not suggest keeping it much longer.  I honestly think at this point, a quad processor machine is a must, even if it's a G5 Quad.  At the very least a core based pci-e model dual 2 or 2.3 G5.  A MacPro is a much better choice of course.  The brand new Harpertown Mac Pros have some issues with the current release, mostly OS related, so waiting for them/Leopard to be approved might be the way to go.  The best thing about the Mac Pros is the 4 internal SATA bays.  You can drop a couple of 1TB SATA drives in there and stripe em' together... presto... 2 TB's of highly affordable high speed storage.

digitaldenial:

If you are delivering in SD, why can't you simply use an HD format and deck that downconverts for you?  You can use the SD downconvert for the edit.

If and when you need an HD deliverable of the program, look into upgrading and see where Avid is at at that time.

How would that work if I'm acquiring on P2 or Firestore? I was hoping my UVW 1800 would be the last deck I ever bought...LOL!

Todd Sanderson:

The best thing about the Mac Pros is the 4 internal SATA bays.  You can drop a couple of 1TB SATA drives in there and stripe em' together... presto... 2 TB's of highly affordable high speed storage.

Question about that: Having multiple drives doesn't create bus conflicts with the Adrenaline box and Arrays?
I was always told the reason AVID couldn't play nice with commercial USB or Firewire drives is that the serial busses were all occupied by the Adrenaline and Array. Do the SATA drives not look for the same architecture?

Firewire and SATA are two completely separate bus segments.

BLKDOG:

Firewire and SATA are two completely separate bus segments.

Just making sure I have this right. The internal SATA drives, supposing you maxed out with 4 TB drives could replace a Mediadock array for HD editing and realtime playback?

That's Very intersting. Hmmmmm :D

Theoretically that's true... I personally have not used my internal SATA Raid for HD however.

Hi all,

I was wondering if some of you might want to try an experiment with me. It's recently been theorized that FW throughput could be greatly enhanced by a flush of the PMU or SMU settings on the motherboard.

On Monday I am going to open up my G5 and reset my SMU to see if my Bus errros get better. Any of you who have problems in this area are welcome to join me and let's see if anything improves....

Instructions for doing this on the Mac Pros can be found here.

'Morning Blkdog, I was installing more RAM in my G5 and so did the SMU reset. Bus errors were approx. 1-2 a week, rarely more than 1 a day. I religiously do a permissions reset on all applicable Avid and  mediafile folders, especially on render heavy projects, on a every two day  schedule. Will let you know if this changes. Hope this helps. 

Terrific 'cat. this is just the test we were hoping for. I hope it helps your situation.

[MOD EDIT]

Removed for Speculation.

?!*/?! darn my first one since March 31st. However I admit I didn't  religiously do a permissions reset on all applicable Avid and  mediafile folders, so am I due for a mea culpa ??

I'' do a permossions reset and see how far I can go . 

and on a totally different subject matter .... sniff sniff snowboard season is done ....... goldarn ..  

Here's an odd observation- I seem to get more of my crashes in the mornings (I shut down my computer each night).  Every morning, within an hour of working I might have two or three crashes and then it's usually pretty good for the rest of the day.  Hmmm.  I'm not going to shut down for a while and see what happens.