Thursday, September 25, 2008

Free Agent Pro nightmare

Well I bought a Free Agent Pro awhile back because I thought the
price was attractive and Seagate is a good company, I've used a lot
of their drives... Well my first big ooops came when I realized the
drive would go to sleep??? I'm working in Protools and my computer
never sleeps and my drives never sleep. A quick Google turned up the
problem. Seagate has build sleep modes into the firmware! Well OK
how do I set it to off? Can't, unless your on Windows. What? Well
OK I can live with this for awhile. It only spins down after 15 min
of inactivity so it's a pain but not a huge one. Fast forward six
months and the other day I see that Seagate has ported the software
to the Mac. And while it doesn't have the sleep setting that the
Windows version has it will pass control to the OS to set the sleep
mode. Great now I can keep this thing from spinning down! So I
install the "drive manager" (which does basically nothing) so I can
set the sleep mode to off. Now it did change the sleep mode, now the
drive spins down after 50 sec of inactivity!!!!! After lots of up
close personal time with Seagate support they promise to send me
uninstall directions (never did) because "Drive manager" installs
drivers... So I will have to look at the logs and trash the pieces
the installer dropped into my system. They also put the blame
squarely on Apple????? They sent me to a link about how to set sleep
modes in the OS, remember I already have told them that I have all
the sleep modes disabled, that they referred to as addressing the
"sleep issue". They also told me to talk to Apple support to find
out why my port was going to sleep??? There are two other firewire
drives on the same chain the Seagate is the only one that has EVER
had a "sleep issue". The short story is DON'T BUY SEAGATE drives if
your on a Mac. This may also wash over to Maxtor since they have
merged, but that is still unknown. Seagate support while "pleasant"
was also the most useless waste of time I have spent in a long time.
There were no Mac knowledgeable people there and emails verged on
insulting and condescending. The gist of the support stance on this
subject is "not our problem". It's a shame to put them on the black
list but if your on a Mac these are expensive door stops.


Sunday, February 24, 2008

New projects

On the stove is They turned my Desert into Fire. A documentary on
Darfur.
On a lighter note, the new website is in a sort of Beta test stage so
hopefully in a week or so it will be up and running.
Also did some studio upgrades, sort of geeky but it's making my life
easier.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Ongoing web site redo

Lots of time lots of work but hopefully a much better site. Recent additions are the FAQ an ongoing project to house some basic sound info and answer some of those questions I get all the time. If you want some topic covered drop me a line and I'll see what I can come up with. There is of course some opinion but mostly information that folks should know, with a slant to the low and very low budget film. Also I've started to put up some video clips that relate to post sound. I need to re output them at a larger size. Need to find a balance between not ugly picture and load time. Plus I need to keep the sound quality high or there isn't much point. Client access has been improved and photos are a little more interesting. And obviously the blog is new.
After the content gets settled we will be implementing a complete make over of the look. The design is done but getting it all to work could take some time.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

SFCutters Supermeet

What a blast. Saw old friends met new ones. Great presentations,
ton's of items raffled off (I didn't win any) but the garage ended up
being free so we won after all! Now back to work.