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External FM HDD info.

1 reply [Last post]
Fri, 06/13/2008 - 21:16
Joe Kern
User offline. Last seen 15 years 2 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 27 Oct 2006

We are getting the LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Drive eSATA 1.5 Gbits Firewire 400/800 USB 2.0 hard drive for the switcher (8000a, ver 6.11). I had a few questions about the set-up and operation of it.

1. When the drive is divided into 5 partitions, how many frames will each partition hold. Our current capacity for the switcher is about 1000 stills. In another post, there was talk of 3 different size drives 320GB, 500GB, 750GB, but according to my info from Sony "The external HDD is partitioned to standard format with a specific size regardless of the capacity of the drive. Getting a larger drive 750GB will not give you any more storage space than a 320GB."

2. When I plug in the drive, I assume the panel will recognize the model of the HDD and I just hit Format (Pg. 2561)

3. I know when you do a restore/back-up it is an all or nothing process, but I was wondering when you do a restore, do other frames already in the frame memory stay or are they erased?

4. I was wondering how other TD's are using the 5 partitions. I'm thinking of putting our generic stills/anim. good for all shows in partition one and specific stills for say 2 other shows in partition 2 and 3. Then depending on the answer to question #3, if I'm doing show "A" which has Partition 1 and 2 loaded and now I do Show "B" which uses Partition 1 and 3, I could just deleted those stills in the Frame Memory that were from Partition #2 and load #3 into the Frame Memory. This would alleviate the need to load Partition #1 again hopefully saving some time. Is this pretty typical or am I over thinking this?

5. Are we limited to 3 second animations(99 frames)? If I have a 5 second animated wallpaper, is this possible to loop in the frame memory?

Thanks in advance for the help

Joe

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Sat, 06/14/2008 - 00:45
#1
Bob Ennis
User offline. Last seen 5 years 14 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 24 Aug 2005
Joe - Here are some answers: (1) It is true that a larger drive won't give you any more storage space than a smaller one. If you figure that 1 HD frame equals about 1MB, you shouldn't run out of storage space even with 5 partitions on the smaller drive - I'm going to assume (assume is the key word here) that the system formats the partitions to be able to handle both the 1000 frames on board 1 + the other 1000 frames available on optional board 2 (G frame only). (2) The system recognizes a supported vs. a non-supported drive. Page 2561 will do the formatting & partitioning for you. (3) Doing a restore automatically erases all frames that are currently in memory...it's an all-or-nothing approach, which some of us are asking to have modified so that we can load without destroying what's in memory. For now, doing a restore blows out everything before it starts the load process. (4) The paritions seem to work best for separate shows. I have Wheel on one partition, Jeopardy on another, a Wheel backup on the 3rd, a Jeopardy back-up on the 4th, and our editor uses the 5th partition. The editor & I are the only ones in the studio, so I can afford to make back-ups. You may have one partition for morning news, another for evening news, another for late news another for weekend news, and another for other productions that you may do. As alluded to in #3, you can't mix-and-match loads from different partitions. (5) If you are doing keyframe-style animations (pre-7.1 software), then you ARE limited to the 99 KF animations. Version 7.1 allows CLIP playbacks, which are treated as single entities (the way that Kalypso does). With CLIP playbacks, your record/playback time is only limited by your available memory.

Bob Ennis

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