Some days things go from bad to worse. This was one of them. The ongoing saga of the programme with added Greek... this morning my son and I went in to the office to copy from the DVCAM to the new video editing computer... and the computer failed.
I then took it down to the computer store. One problem was that the BIOS on the motherboard didn't support DVD writers [we use a DVD writer] so the store technician flashed a new bios onto the motherboard and the DVD writer started working and the RAID system stopped working.
On the servers we use RAID to 'mirror' the hard drive so that if one fails the other can take over. On the video editing computers we use RAID in a different mode so that each drive is used alternately making one very large hard drive that is very fast!
So they then tried a new RAID card. This took at least a hour, because the BIOS on the RAID card was incompatible with the BIOS on the motherboard so it to had to be flashed with a new bios. Eventually all seemed to work together except one of the removeable units for one of the hard drives.
We use removeable hard drives so that we can have three pairs of hard drives [ie 6 hard drives in total] because we need so much space for video editing we cannot have enough space on one pair, so we swap them for different projects.
The computer store is supposed to close at 2pm but stayed open till 4pm working on it, which meant that I didn't have lunch till 4.30pm.
When I got back to the office after late lunch I replaced the faulty removeable hard drive caddy, found the second new one was faulty, bodged a way round using some old removeable hard drive caddies and then... had problems with the RAID system, which it had not be possible to see because the removeable hard drive system had not been working.
The RAID system failed totally. Fought with it for a couple of hours and then it was time for dinner.
Back after dinner... managed to get the system going sufficiently to copy the programme [this time correctly - no added Greek and high quality] onto a hard drive. Finished 9.45 pm.
Frustrated.
Very frustrated!
When I get back from this trip I will have to start again trying to get the new and the old video edit computers to work. The aim is that the new one will become our main editing computer, hopefully much faster than the old one, and the old one will be used in the ProTools sound dubbing system as the video playback system.
One option is to purchase new SATA hard drives for the new computer. We don't really have the funds for this - already the new edit computer has had unbudgeted an extra new motherboard, an extra new RAID card, and a new Matrox dual head graphics card...
Sometimes I think it would be a good idea to swap over to video editing on an Apple MAC, but that would be even more expensive!
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