I am trying to capture footage for an HD project and I haven't been successful in doing so.  I always got a message saying "Capture aborted due to video overrun"  This pops up after about 3 seconds of capturing.  I talked with one of the other editors here and was told that it was due to the hard drives were too slow for the HD footage.  I can capture on the mac hard drive but not on the external hard drives.  It was suggested that I stripe two drives together.  So I got two new My Book 500 GB hard drives, striped them together and still got the same result.  I tried partitioning one of the hard drives and tried to capture just to the one drive by both firewire 400 and usb, but still the same result.  I could not partition the striped drives and could not stipe the partitioned drives.  I am sue that there is an easy answer, I just don't know it.

OS 10.4.11
4 x 205 GHz Power PC G5
4 GB DDR2 SDRAM
2 Maxtor 300 GB External Hard Drives
3 Lacie 300 GB External Hard Drives
2 My Book 500 GB External Hard Drives
Media Composer 2.8
Adrenaline
Panasonic DVCPRO Deck AJ-HD1400

Steve, there is no way you are going to capture HD footage to those FW drives unless you have them set up in a Raid configuration.

Do you?

 If you mean going through disk utility and under the raid type tab, my choices are Mirrored RAID set, Striped RAID set , or Concatenated Disk Set. 

I chose Striped RAID Set.  Then yes I have them set up on a RAID Configuration.  Otherwise I am not aware of any other way to do so.

 From Friday to today, we have tried everything possible for capturing but still get the same error message.  We even tried turning off the adrenaline and capture straight from HD camera to hard drive via usb. But still no go.  My only thought is to install an external firewire card so that the adrenaline and other FW drives aren't fighting for speed on current firewire bus set up.

To get this to work you will need to solve at least two issues: Having enough drive speed to record the footage and having enough bandwidth to drive your devices.

Buying a second Firewire card will help you immensly - but as long as you are limited to external HD boxes with a firewire cable daisy-chaining them to the computer - you'll never get enough recording speed.

The best (and, oddly, least expensive) solution is to use additional drive bays in your MacG5 (I presume you meant you have a 2x Dual Core 2.25GHz G5 right?)

Buy a "Jive Carrier"

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/g5_jive.html

...and a SATA RAID PCIe card (do a search for recommended SATA cards)

Then you can buy standard SATA 300 drives for the bays - buy at least two (four is terrific) of the same size drives and use the Mac (Either Disk Utility or ExpressStripe) to stripe these internal drives together as a "Striped RAID0"

Then you'll have more than enough speed and bandwidth to accomodate all of your inputs.

Second option: (Not as good and more expensive) If you want to connect the Adrenaline AND your external Firewire drives. You will need to buy a PCIe Firewire card for EACH external drive you want to connect. Then you can RAID 0 the firewire drives to each other and use the built-in Firewire connector for your Adrenaline.

Third Option: (May or may not work) The new Intel 8Core systems have a seperate firewire bus for the front and back ports. you might be able to use an external drive on the front and the Adrenaline on the back and get away with the system being fast enough to keep up with the HD content.

 Thanks for the advice.

Everything you said is pretty much everything I have heard.  One of the other editors here also suggested a SATA card...I will have to investigate further.  In the meantime I have come up with a workaround that is working so far.  Instead of importing HD footage and editing in HD and then downconverting to SD, I am downconverting on the import.

 Ok...Since this last post I have aquired a "LaCie Biggest S2S Raid SATA Drive, installed the SATA II 3Gb/s PCI-Express card.

When everything is hooked up I still get the same "Capture aboted due to video overrun".  I disconneted all other FW drives from the system and still got the same message.  I can capture the the Mac internal hard drive but not the new SATA drive.

Any thought on why this is still happening?

In what resolution are you capturing Steve?

 I tried both DNxHD 145 MXF and DNxHD 220 MXF.  On both I got the same error message.

 I am supposed to have the local reseller coming today to help figure out why I can't capture HD footage.

Steve

What slot is your pci card in?  I'm looking at the specs on that G5 and there are two 4 lane pci slots, one 8-lane and one 16-lane.  Since the video card takes the 16 lane slot, you need to have that pci card in the 8 lane slot, which is slot 3.

Order bottom to top:

Slot 1- 16 lane (gfx card)
Slot 2- 4 lane
Slot 3- 8 lane
Slot 4- 4 lane

You should be able to get DNX into that machine with a couple of drives striped. I agree to check the card. Any raid is a little heavy to install on your own, owing to the card slot issues mentioned above, raid settings and other things. Anything more than a couple of drives striped and I'd get some help.

Also, when buying stuff, make your reseller guarantee that it will work. You will still have to pay for the install but there are 8,000 weirdo raid systems out there. Some work, and some never do. Don't sign off until they show you that you are getting some serious bandwidth out of that thing. They can't be responsible for your whole machine, but if they sell you an incompatible product, they should back it up and take it back

Just my .02 but I believe in buying from a solid dealer within "baseball bat" distance. Mail order storage is a sucker's game

"baseball bat distance" = close enough to drive there with a baseball bat if things are seriously jacked.

Note: hidefcowboy does not endorse nor condone violence against dealers and or techs... this offer not valid in the state of Arkansas, Island of Guam or any British Colonies. And West Virginia? You're on your own.

Hey Guys,

Thanks for all the advice, the drive is in the number 3 slot, and when they came here yesterday he basically restripped the drive and it works fine now.  I can capture HD footage no problem, however when he restripped the drive I went from a 2.5TB down to a 1.8TB drive so somewhere I lost almost a full TB.  Any thoughts on why that would happen?  Don't get me wrong, I do think that 1.8TB is enough space, but I paid for 2.5, so I should get that or at least close to that.

If he raided the drive with any type of redundancy or mirroring, that would account for the loss.