Lightworks Tips - Hard Drive Crashes

Lightworks Tips:

Hard Drive Crashes

by John Venzon and Paul Karasick

Hard Drive To Hell, or How to Crash But Not Burn

It's 11 pm at night and you need to tape the entire show for the director by 8 am. Suddenly one of your drives crashes. You didn't back up the material files to Exabyte tapes like the Lightworks startup screen told you to. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?

There are many levels of crashing when it comes to hard drives. The first sign of trouble comes when certain shots start to stick while playing. Before you panic, this might be a generic glitch, also known as 'stuttering.' This occurs when you force the Lightworks to play back more than the hard drive can handle. This usually can be fixed by moving the offending shot onto another drive and restarting the Lightworks. Try to play through the section again and see if it helps. You might find that the system will crash, or not allow you to move the material. This is an indication of a bigger problem, the "spiraling down from 30,000 feet with plenty of time to realize you are plummeting to your death" kind. This is intermittent at first but soon becomes worse. You will finally notice error messages on the monochrome monitor telling you "data is not cached" and three numbers listing the drive location of the problem. The Lightworks will usually lock up and the messages will repeat over and over and over and.. Call Lightworks or your tech support person and tell them what is happening. Take a deep breath and please... stop screaming.

The first step in saving yourself is to isolate the drive with the problem and move the material to a different one. To locate the drive, write down the three numbers that are separated by commas. The first number indicates SCSI Card/Tower number, the second is drive ID, and the third is LUN number. The Card/Tower number starts with 0 and goes up from there based on how many cards/towers you can have attached to the Lightworks. For a system with 3 towers, the numbers would be 0, 1 and 2. The drive ID will be number 0-6 and the LUN, for the current version of Lightworks, is 0. For example 0,2,0 would be tower one, third drive.

In a complete crash, the drive might not even spin up. If it doesn't, try turning it off, then on over and over again, to see it you can get the drive up. If it does spin up, copy everything off it onto a free drive and consider yourself lucky. It gets sticky if you have drives larger than 3 gigabytes. A 9 gigabyte drive must be split into two 4 gigabyte 'partitions' so the Lightworks will see it. When you have a drive crash, if it does spin up, odds are that only one of the partitions is affected. This means if you replace the drive, you will lose both partitions. When you get the new drive, make sure to copy each partition before you return the old drive.

If you aren't able to copy the material off the dead drive, get back up into the Lightworks. Create a new room called "Crash" and call up your edit. This way if it crashes and it trashes the room, just shark the bad room and start over. At this point, figure out what you need to redigitize. If you have all the time in the world, simply search for a database of shots by the drive letter (lowercase and without a colon) and redigitize them to a new drive.

However, if you are pressed for time (remember that tape for the director?) you must prioritize. Open the edit and select 'make a gallery of shots used'. Put all the shots that are black in a separate gallery and label it as bad.

Be careful not to play through the shots from the crashed drive, as it may crash again. Next, select 'create logging database' on the gallery of bad shots, and name it "REDIG". When you are ready to redigitize these shots, you can load this database in the digitizing tool. Sort the database by tape roll number, then pull the tapes you will need and away you go. The only drawback to this method is the Lightworks will ignore the Nagra/secondary time code.

If you are using the secondary time code to trace back to the 1/4" or DAT, you will either need to type the timecode into the filecard for each shot after digitizing, or go back to your original telecine floppies for each tape roll. After digitizing, use the "Find material to fill edit" command for the edits you will need to tape for the director. When time permits, go back and redigitize the remainder of the drive and rebuild the galleries.

The next morning you hand over the tape to the director and sit back and relax. After you recover, tell your post supervisor that you need an Exabyte backup tape drive to avoid having to redigitize anything ever again. You deserve it.

Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
Vol. 17, No. 1 - Jan/Feb 1996

Guild Home | Newsletter Home | Top of Page

Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 776


*Lightworks Tips:* Hard Drive Crashes by John Venzon and Paul Karasick

Hard Drive To Hell, or How to Crash But Not Burn	It's 11 pm at night and you need to tape the entire show for the director by 8 am. Suddenly one of your drives crashes. You didn't back up the material files to Exabyte tapes like the Lightworks startup screen told you to. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO? There are many levels of crashing when it comes to hard drives. The first sign of trouble comes when certain shots start to stick while playing. Before you panic, this might be a generic glitch, also known as 'stuttering.' This occurs when you force the Lightworks to play back more than the hard drive can handle. This usually can be fixed by moving the offending shot onto another drive and restarting the Lightworks. Try to play through the section again and see if it helps. You might find that the system will crash, or not allow you to move the material. This is an indication of a bigger problem, the "spiraling down from 30,000 feet with plenty of time to realize you are plummeting to your death" kind. This is intermittent at first but soon becomes worse. You will finally notice error messages on the monochrome monitor telling you "data is not cached" and three numbers listing the drive location of the problem. The Lightworks will usually lock up and the messages will repeat over and over and over and.. Call Lightworks or your tech support person and tell them what is happening. Take a deep breath and please... stop screaming. The first step in saving yourself is to isolate the drive with the problem and move the material to a different one. To locate the drive, write down the three numbers that are separated by commas. The first number indicates SCSI Card/Tower number, the second is drive ID, and the third is LUN number. The Card/Tower number starts with 0 and goes up from there based on how many cards/towers you can have attached to the Lightworks. For a system with 3 towers, the numbers would be 0, 1 and 2. The drive ID will be number 0-6 and the LUN, for the current version of Lightworks, is 0. For example 0,2,0 would be tower one, third drive. In a complete crash, the drive might not even spin up. If it doesn't, try turning it off, then on over and over again, to see it you can get the drive up. If it does spin up, copy everything off it onto a free drive and consider yourself lucky. It gets sticky if you have drives larger than 3 gigabytes. A 9 gigabyte drive must be split into two 4 gigabyte 'partitions' so the Lightworks will see it. When you have a drive crash, if it does spin up, odds are that only one of the partitions is affected. This means if you replace the drive, you will lose both partitions. When you get the new drive, make sure to copy each partition before you return the old drive. If you aren't able to copy the material off the dead drive, get back up into the Lightworks. Create a new room called "Crash" and call up your edit. This way if it crashes and it trashes the room, just shark the bad room and start over. At this point, figure out what you need to redigitize. If you have all the time in the world, simply search for a database of shots by the drive letter (lowercase and without a colon) and redigitize them to a new drive. However, if you are pressed for time (remember that tape for the director?) you must prioritize. Open the edit and select 'make a gallery of shots used'. Put all the shots that are black in a separate gallery and label it as bad. Be careful not to play through the shots from the crashed drive, as it may crash again. Next, select 'create logging database' on the gallery of bad shots, and name it "REDIG". When you are ready to redigitize these shots, you can load this database in the digitizing tool. Sort the database by tape roll number, then pull the tapes you will need and away you go. The only drawback to this method is the Lightworks will ignore the Nagra/secondary time code. If you are using the secondary time code to trace back to the 1/4" or DAT, you will either need to type the timecode into the filecard for each shot after digitizing, or go back to your original telecine floppies for each tape roll. After digitizing, use the "Find material to fill edit" command for the edits you will need to tape for the director. When time permits, go back and redigitize the remainder of the drive and rebuild the galleries. The next morning you hand over the tape to the director and sit back and relax. After you recover, tell your post supervisor that you need an Exabyte backup tape drive to avoid having to redigitize anything ever again. You deserve it.
Reprinted from The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter Vol. 17, No. 1 - Jan/Feb 1996 Guild Home \| Newsletter Home \| Top of Page Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 776