Hello and help, please!

I am running avid xpress pro v5.7 on macbook pro, mac os 10.4.11.

I captured probably 7 hours of footage to a project on  new  G raid 1 Tb drive, partitioned into 6 drives. I made about 7 sequences, before I started having the problem that now I work and after 5-20 minutes, at some point when I click on a clip in a bin to put it in the monitor, i get the spinning wheel, and have to force quit the program. I usually have to force quit the program a number of times- it finally disappears from the screen- but still appears open in the dock (with an arrow next to it.) I can't open the program again, must shut down the computer, and even that process does not complete itself. All the programs close, but it freezes on an empty desktop and I have to force quit the program by holding down the power.

I can restart and work for a little bit, but the problem repeats. I opened a new project and copied some of the files and it worked fine for one night, and then it just happened again when I tried to keep working.  I have a lot of unrendered color effects on the sequences, could that do it? 

Any suggestions??

Thanks so much!

According to the version matrix, you should be running OS 10.4.8, not 10.4.11. The unrendered color effects would not be the cause of this problem. You can also try deleting the "(Project name)settings.avs" file that you will find in the specific project's folder. It may have become corrupted.

Has this system worked correctly earlier, and if so, what has changed in either hardware and/or software since then?

The system worked fine as it is, with different hard drives. With this new hard drive, the system has run fine for about a month while I was only capturing. I suspect it might be the hard drive, because I starting to think that other programs don't run as well when the g raid is mounted. I will try deleting the settings and see if that helps. 

Thanks for your help, yet again!

HI, Thanks for your help yesterday. I deleted project settings and the problem continues. I think it is the hard drive (new graid 1.5 tb) because the problem seems to come when accessing clips. I am wondering if it had to do with how I partitioned the drive into 6 and formatted it. It is formatted as Mac OS extended, partitioned into six drives of 232.75 GB each.  

Should I have formatted as Mac OS extended (Journaled)?  I plan to erase and reformat hard drive, without partitioning. How do I transfer the media files, considering there are "avid media files" folders on 5 of the 6 drives, and OMFI folders on 2 of the 6 drives. Do I dump all the MXF files into one folder? Actually only 1 of the 2 omfi folders has contents- the other is empty- so that should not be a problem. 

Thanks so much for your help!

I'm in the PC world here, so I'm afraid I can't advise you on Mac OS formatting, sorry.

Regarding moving media folders and files, I believe you should be able to copy the numerical folders from the source drives and add them to the MXF folder on the target drive, but keep the numbers consecutive - meaning if you have folders 1 to 3 already on the target drive, renumber the folders from the source drive starting at 4. Then, delete the two database files in each numerical folder, so they'll rebuild. Copy the contents of all source OMFI folders to one OMFI folder on the target drive, and delete those database files as well. On re-launch, the system will detect the missing files and build new ones at the "Initializing Media Streams Manager" stage. You will see it go into a scanning and indexing mode at that point. Depending on the size of your media storage, that could take a while - good time for a meal break.

And here are the ground rules for Media folder management:

1) The "Avid MediaFiles" folder (for MXF media) and the "OMFI MediaFiles" folder (for OMF media) MUST reside at the root level of the media drive, never inside any other folders or the system will not find the media.

2) The folder names must always be the factory default names listed above (minus the quotes) or the system will not find the media.

3) There can be only one of each folder type on any given media drive.