Ten year veteran newbie questions

[TimKennelly]

Thank you John, I try to help where I can and be truthful always.

Actually, Craig you pretty much make my case that everyone with the knowledge that is/was willing to help others has moved on too far either with Smart Edit or Bogart to reliably remember what were the limits of SE6.

I personally have not been using Smart Edit anything for almost two years now and most of the archive ability of the old forum corrupted to uselessness and the move to the new forum eliminated even that.

Like you I would have to research this and try to relearn it (and would need an old machine to even try that) and that goes far beyond the time constraints I have to help others.

Especially when the resources are out there.

In the short of it John, no the Kron cannot and will not format an external hard drive for compatibility.

The unit needs to be formatted as a single FAT32 partition.

Using Advanced Search with FAT32 narrowed down to my own name I found a reference to a free program on the PC that can be downloaded to do this, but you need some PC know how to both connect the drive right to do this and to follow the directions as well.

Here is the url if you have the knowledge and capabilities.

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index. ... format.htm
Even so, what I remember of those early Smart Edit capabilities with external hard drives they were real primitive and definitely did not allow you to edit to or from an external hard drive.

[BobNaughton]

John:
I dont believe the drive that your wife won will be able to be used in your Kron, because you stated that it was a SATA drive. To the best of my knowledge our Casablanca 2 machines, Prestige, Avio, Kron and Solitaire are only compatible with Pata or IDE drives. The SATA drives are wired different in the electronic hookup somehow. Thats why the drives MS recommends are the Lacie type drives. They are Pata drives and are formatted I believe in FAT32, which is an older design, but very compatible with how our cassies are internally wired or something. If you were really into computers you probably could make it work with adapters and fiddling around with it, but it might be easier (and more cost efficient) to just check out with Macrosystem, which Lacie Ext HD might work for you.
On one of the newer post in this forum I remember seeing some information about a SATA to PATA Adapter. I never heard of that being used before, but as our Gen 2 cassies start to develop Hard Drive problems, and the PATA drives are becoming obsolete and hard to find, an Adapter of some kind would be very useful. Good luck in your Quest to get up and running again.

I didn't notice Tims last post which gave a more in depth answer than I gave, I didn't see the 2nd page. Anyway I just thought I would add that, If you got an MS authorized Lacie drive you should be able to hook up and back up your work by saving your storyboard in your project, with the limitations that still exist on up to Smart Edit 8. It will not save your transitions between scenes, Inserts pasted over your original source clips, or music or sound effects on the lower tracks below the source audio. Even if you have created or rendered it. It will only save your original audio! This was designed mainly to save a completed project that you had made a "scene" of or save your storyboard.

[BobNaughton]

John;

Ran out of room trying to edit my last post. You could also Add any scenes in your scene bin to the storyboard and save them also. However We still dont have the capability to just edit directly to an external hard drive without using the internal Hard Drive as of Smart Edit 8. I dont know if Smart Edit 9 or 10 will get us that , but I'm guessing that we will all have to switch over to the new Bogart Gen 3 machines with some future software to still be developed for that capability.

[Jeanton]

Hi John

Is there something wrong with your internal hard drive?
Why don't you just start editing and go from there on and worry about the extra hard drive later.
It has been given to you so if it doesn't work there is no loss to you.
You can fit a few hours of footage on those ones.

[CKNewman]

What does 160 GB "solid state" mean?

I haven't heard that we have to stick with PATA drives when using an external enclosure.

160 gigs is rather small for a video archive drive - you may want to use it with your home computer instead.

[MichaelD]

It seem (if I remember correctly) that the big attraction from SE4 to SE6 was that 6 allowed for an external hard drive which could be used to duplicate the project and scene bin. Am I correct in that?

Not exactly. An external ‘Firewire’ hard drive, formatted to FAT 32, can be used to back-up the Story Board – the same as if going to tape, but faster.

Coincidentally, my wife scored a 160gig SATA drive at work yesterday. It's one of those drives about the size of a pack of cards and half as thick. It needs an encasement and some kind of adapter cable, I suppose. Can this be used as an external drive to my Kron?

If the new case allows a SATA drive to be fitted internally and this has a Firewire connection then this could work, but without trying I couldn’t say.
Getting a Series II machine to talk to an external Firewire device can, sometimes, be tricky. Even some of the pre-produced units wouldn’t/couldn’t talk to the Casablanca.
As for being Solid State I’d imagine that this might involve certain software routines that 6 year old software simply couldn’t be expected to handle.
In other words I’d ditch the idea
If you still want to back-up, which is always a good idea, then buy a LaCie from MSUS.

I've got 6.2d. Is that the last free update I can get?

That’s as new as you can get without spending money.

(. . . and even now with Bogart you can't use a ex drive for editing only storage.)

You can with Store ‘n’ Share, PAL only as yet . . . but it must be coming soon in the US.

I was rooting around the 6.2d menus last and found a button for "backup / restore archives". When I clicked on it, I got three options for CD/DVD, Firewire hard-drive, and USB stick.

These three options appear regardless of if a Firewire or USB stick is inserted - but they are the media that the machine could output on to.
That particular function is to save any 'Archives' that you have used on the machine in any projects, titles, colours etc.
It is a useful feature to use if you have to do a distructive install of the OS.

How does one format a drive for the Kron? Will it just happen by itself when I connect 'em ... like a computer does when you hook up a drive that hasn't been formatted? (On computers, you usually get a pop-up screen that says something like "drive not recognizable ... do you wish to format?")

I’m afraid not. Older PC’s still have the (easy) ability to format to FAT32 but with XP, Vista & 7 you’ll need to ‘find’ a program to help, as Tim mentions below.
Mac’s still have the option for this in “Disk Utility” – Bogart machines can format their own drives (with HD Back-up software or Store ‘n’ Share).

"" Here is the url if you have the knowledge and capabilities.

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index. ... format.htm ""

. . . with the limitations that still exist on up to Smart Edit 8. It will not save your transitions between scenes, Inserts pasted over your original source clips, or music or sound effects on the lower tracks below the source audio. Even if you have created or rendered it. It will only save your original audio!

This is mainly true when using the Project Back-Up in ‘DV Back-up’ mode. However if you select just the ‘DV’ option it will keep inserts (albeit embedded), music (again embedded), titles etc etc but will also add the transition at the end of each previous scene – which as a back-up, works well for me.

Ran out of room trying to edit my last post. You could also Add any scenes in your scene bin to the storyboard and save them also.

This is a quick and easy remedy to saving everything. I stick a ‘Colour Bar’ scene at the end of my Story Board and then add relevant scenes from the Scene bin after that. Then when you re-store the project and go to split you can get the scenes added to both the Scene Bin and the Story Board (even in SE v6) and then just delete the ones that aren’t where they are supposed to be.

However We still dont have the capability to just edit directly to an external hard drive without using the internal Hard Drive as of Smart Edit 8.
I dont know if Smart Edit 9 or 10 will get us that . . .

There is a suggestion that Store ‘n’ Share might be released for Smart Edit – if & when I don’t know nor which SE will be necessary – but I’d guess SE v9 will allow its use.

[TimKennelly]

Yes, I am aware of that future feature, but John is a USA NTSC user, as am I, you did read my "even now" in the statement, correct?

[MichaelD]

Sure - I'm sure Lou still wouldn't agree . . . but we live in Hope