Tricaster Hard Drive partitions and dragging large files

[JAM Pro]

Has anybody (everybody) noticed that Tricasters have great gobs of space to record live output, etc.,
but getting the recordings OFF the Tricaster onto say, an external drive, is almost impossible?

I have made 3 hour recordings, 15 min recordings, 30 min recordings...
but when it comes to dragging them off the hard drive, you'd better
hope they are under 3.5 gig or you are screwed. I have imagined that this
is due to the way the HDs are partitioned. I have a Pro, and there is
precious little space for the Windows to make a "virtual copy" prior to the transfer.
It will drag the .mp3 audio files fine, but of course they are small. It will drag some
smaller time frame video files.

If you cannot get them off, the only way to retrieve your files is to go
into the non-linear editor panel and RENDER 15 minute segments into clips one at a
time to an external drive. And no matter WHERE you send these clips,
to the Tricaster drives or external, if you go over 17 minutes, you ALWAYS get a frame error,
and I mean always. But not before you waste 17 minutes. So take my advice on that one.

Does ANYBODY know a way around this? Am I crazy? Will Newtek just take
the unit BACK? Cause I would sure send it. I love what it DOES, but mine is a bit squirrelly.

[PIZAZZ]

Has anybody (everybody) noticed that Tricasters have great gobs of space to record live output, etc.,
but getting the recordings OFF the Tricaster onto say, an external drive, is almost impossible?

I have made 3 hour recordings, 15 min recordings, 30 min recordings...
but when it comes to dragging them off the hard drive, you'd better
hope they are under 3.5 gig or you are screwed. I have imagined that this
is due to the way the HDs are partitioned. I have a Pro, and there is
precious little space for the Windows to make a "virtual copy" prior to the transfer.
It will drag the .mp3 audio files fine, but of course they are small. It will drag some
smaller time frame video files.

If you cannot get them off, the only way to retrieve your files is to go
into the non-linear editor panel and RENDER 15 minute segments into clips one at a
time to an external drive. And no matter WHERE you send these clips,
to the Tricaster drives or external, if you go over 17 minutes, you ALWAYS get a frame error,
and I mean always. But not before you waste 17 minutes. So take my advice on that one.

Does ANYBODY know a way around this? Am I crazy? Will Newtek just take
the unit BACK? Cause I would sure send it. I love what it DOES, but mine is a bit squirrelly.

I have clients that move several hour long files around all the time. Is your external drive formated in NTFS or Fat32? This can make a huge difference. I would suggest using NTFS without a doubt. If you need Mac compability then I would suggest moving the files across a gigabit network connection versus an external hard drive. That works very well. Even for files hours long.

Oh and if you are one of the lucky ones with an ESata connection on your TriCaster then by all means use that into an external drive. That would be the fastest way without a doubt.

[SBowie]

I would suggest using NTFS without a doubt. If you need Mac compability ...AFAIK, OS X can read NTFS formatted drives just fine. (It can't write them out of the box, but there are third party utils if you really need that).

... I would suggest moving the files across a gigabit network connection versus an external hard drive. That works very well.Agreed again. Gigabit is sweet.

[JAM Pro]

thanks for the info, I would not have thought that would make a diff.
I thought the "brain" of the OS would demand the creation of a copy, JUST to transfer,
and that the OS partition was too small...but it ain't so small that it should have trouble with 4-10 gig files.

[SBowie]

NTFS is your friend. :)

The TriCaster 'family' manual contains the following details:

Important Note: external media devices are often pre-formatted using ®Microsoft’s FAT file system because of its broad compatibility (for example, an Apple™ computer running recent versions of OS X has no problem with FAT-formatted external drives). Unfortunately, FAT imposes a strict file size maximum of four gigabytes. Video file size can often exceed that limit, resulting in various error messages.

The newer NTFS file system removes this limitation, and is recommended for external media you intend to use for transferring large files. Generally, you can reformat external media to NTFS using a Windows 2000, XP or Vista system.

NTFS doesn’t solve all cross-platform issues, however. At the time of writing, OS X™ versions 10.3 and later offer read-only NTFS support. Some third-party solutions purport to provide full NTFS support under OS X, but for the greatest convenience you may find it convenient to avoid the whole issue by transferring large files using a network connection.

[SportsJunkie]

This is a sweet little drive that we use. It has a bunch of interfaces for I/O. Sometimes we use USB. Sometimes eSata. Just depends on what gear we need to "talk" to.

http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=11158

[SBowie]

USB isn't generally all that fast, when you have options ....

[JAM Pro]

USB isn't generally all that fast, when you have options ....

You are right, and you are really right when you copy and paste that
section of the manual about FAT...it occurs to me that when I have tried
to write DVDs with Roxio, it was telling me that I had a 4G maximum file
size...derh. I have not checked any of that with my Tricaster unit, or with
the external drive, but it makes perfect sense. Thanks for the various and
sundry help. I found it hard to believe that I was having those probs and it
was not a ubiquitous issue.