Geeky Mac

If you are the proud owner of an Apple Xserve RAID, and a Final Cut Pro editor, you might run into a small problem. You can’t capture video. The good news is there is any easy fix.

During a past (1.5) Xserve RAID firmware update Apple added some functionality that is potentially fatal to Final Cut Pro editors. If you are getting errors like, dropped frames, or timecode breaks that are not there you may be a victim.

Apple is aware that many users use the Xserve RAID for video editing, but they also have many enterprise clients as well. Because of this, Apple has introduced an option called “allow host cache flushing”. This is nice because it allows the user to setup how they want this to work. But for video editors it is a bad idea.

So if you are having Final Cut capture problems and use an Xserve RAID, you might want to check your RAID settings. You need to make sure that the allow host cache flushing setting in NOT checked. Apple provides additional documentation here.

It is really easy to turn off:

1. Select the appropriate RAID in RAID Admin.
2. Click the Settings button.
3. Authenticate when prompted.
4. Select the Performance tab.
5. You should see a window like the one below—uncheck or check the box as appropriate.

It is that easy, but there is one catch. Since Apple has decided that this feature should turned on by default, anytime power is cycled on the RAID, you will need to update this setting.