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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Weapon Helium MINI-MAGs not copying properly to external drives

Tanner Herriott

Tanner Herriott

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Just got my Weapon Helium and the MINI-MAGs are not copying over to external drives properly. I'm used to my Epic Dragon and being able to just "copy/paste" the REDMAG to external drives, but no dice with these Napoleon complex'd MINIs. But alas, with your help I will be their Waterloo...

Each time I've tried to transfer it just ends up crashing my computer. I have two 512 MINI-MAGs and both are having issues. I've had some luck transferring individual clips instead of the entire card, but yea that sucks... Seems like I can transfer individual clips but my system crashes (and shuts down) at a specific clip on each individual MINI-MAG.

Any help?

SPECS:

Weapon Helium (Firmware Version 6.3.57)
8k .R3D & 2k ProRes proxies
2x MINI-MAGs
2016 MacBook Pro 3.3 GHz Intel Core i7
G-Tech G-DRIVE mobile with Thunderbolt 1TB & G-Tech G-Drive Mobile USB 3
 
Bad cable somewhere? I know I've had bad e-sata cables in the past which caused issues.
 
I'm also on the train of never copying and pasting directly within MacOS. I've had a card copy over with corrupt footage once or twice a few years back, and decided it's not a good idea. Hedge looks fantastic, and I believe I'll be switching my workflow to that fairly soon (thanks for the link!)... But for now I use an app called Forklift. It's this hybrid FTP / Finder app, but it uses the native command rSync to copy files and put them in a copy queue - so you can queue up both drives to download the footage and walk away.

For your issue, I recommend both switching your cable and resetting your PRAM. Mostly the PRAM reset honestly, as I've seen hard drive transfer speeds be affected by hardware not talking correctly fairly often. Then check out one of these apps and see if you still have any looming issues !
 
Another +1 for hedge. Seems to be the best app until you jump up to the major DIT pro apps.
 
Whille there is some good advice in this thread your problem is more fundamental and should be addressed directly. You should be able to make a simple Finder copy of your Mini Mags. You likely have a hardware issue. Start with the cables then try another computer. Can you access and try another Minimag Reader? Try other external drives. Reboot your computer. Go through the chain and try and isolate the issue. IF its hardware then trying alternate copy apps is not going to help.
 
Definitely agree with Tom; you should. It be having this issue. It could be that the reader is not getting enough power.

Personally, I use Shotput. Cheap and works damn well
 
Thank you Tom. It'll be tough to get access to another Mini-Mag reader where I live, but I can try on another computer (MacPro), other cables, other hard drives, etc.

I just finished two more days of shooting on this job and we ended up just shooting at 6k with no proxies and didn't run into transfer issues. We also tested the workflow using an older MacBook Pro in addition to my 2016 MBP and didn't have issues. ALSO, on day one I shot till each card maxed out and stopped recording. We were also shooting at temps in the teens (Fahrenheit) all day. Would those additional factors be an issue?

Thanks again for all the help and suggestions.
 
+1 for Hedge -- bought it a few weeks ago and haven't looked back. It's fantastic.

Also, copying large amounts of data causing crashes could potentially be an issue with one or more of your disks. If their HDDs run some diagnostics -- could have a bad sector that's causing issues. Disk Utility in OSX will be helpful...but I use SoftRaid for my RAID array and it just alerted me to a bad sector. Replacing the drive soon and have since run into random shutdowns during heavy read/write. I'm attributing that to the bad drive (hopefully the new one comes in today).
 
A bit of an update with the problem... I had two more days on the shoot and didn't run into another problem. I *did* notice a few other 2016 MacBook Pro users who were having issues transferring footage to/from drives with their fancy new laptops that Apple took four years to update...
 
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