Frames Were Dropped

Product: Flyer

Platforms: 2000 3000 3000T 4000 4000T

Problem: When recording, get error message that "Frames were dropped, need to re-record to a faster drive, or at lower quality level".

Possible causes include:

1) Video that is too complex for the drive at the current quality level. You must select the next lower quality level, and retry.

2) The drive reaches a portion of its platters with slower access, and cannot fully support the speed for the selected quality level. This will occur if the drives were not short-stroked for the highest quality level the user intends to record at. Sometimes this may occur even if the drive was short-stroked, but has been in operation for some length of time since then. As drives age, performance may change, which requires the user to retest them and reformat at a new short-stroke setting. See also: short-stroke

3) The drive performs a thermal calibration (T-cal) that makes it "play dead" for longer length of time than the Flyer and drive RAM buffers can cover. Statistically, this can happen at some time with any drive that is not an "embedded servo" type hard drive. Usually all that is needed is to retry the recording. If a drive begins to exhibit this long T-Cal problem on a regular basis, this could be an indicator of impending drive failure.