When I say freezes up the rainbow ball just spins after I drop a track into the empty deck, but the music still plays, just have to restart in order for it to work. It normally plays a few tracks but then it freezes up again. Not sure why.

USB 3.0 might be the issue.

Why would that be? Wouldn't it be faster since I would be doing video?

Yes, but new technology. Drivers and stuff not worked out yet.

How long do you think it will be before they get that done? Any idea? I just paid a lot for this Mac. I really do like it, but should I take it back and just use my older Mac Book?

First try playing your videos off of a different external and see if that is the problem.

They told me that was the best one, do know of any others?

Where do you get your video files? How are they encoded?

This too.

take 5 videos that don't work on your current setup.
Put them on a different external, or on your internal and see what happens.

I buy them from the Video sites they are good from what I can tell and the bad ones I would delete. I also mix mp3's with movie tags as well in Video. Does that bring a problem? I did that as well with different externals.

That doesn't really mean anything since there are alot of "video sites" putting out poorly encoded videos

Wouldn't Serato pick it up if they were bad files?

Are all your files analyzed.

Yes

Plus all of us doing video mixing are using firewire 400 or 800 or

What is your USB buffer at. Wait are you using mountain lion.

Is your video quality set to best if so go to medium

The rainbow beachball basically means "waiting for data from a hard drive", so my first suspects are the USB 3.0 connectivity and the external hard drive itself.

Corrupted files would be more likely to crash SL and/or SV, or you might see something like "the waveform getting eaten away as the file plays" (with or without normal audio playback).

Of course getting files from reputable sources (and/or properly encoding them yourself) is always excellent advice.

I would not expect a too-high setting for video quality to result in "beachballing". The same amount of data comes off the storage device and into SL/SV regardless of video quality setting.

USB buffer is set at 10 I even tried 5 and it still was doing that. Yes Mountain Lion that comes with the new MacBooks

Then on Serato Video tab output buffersize set to 200MB & Delay Compensation set in the middle.

Yes Medium

I just don't get it, I know they say MacBooks are the best to run Serato. I am not sure what I am doing wrong? I just get the beachball and it never goes away. So I have to restart every time, but the music still plays....It doesn't stop..

What is a good external Drive that is FireWire? What do you use and what kind of laptop do you own? I am using G-DRIVE MOBILE USB 3.0

My friend uses Western Digital - My Book Studio Edition 1TB External FireWire 800 and USB 2.0 Hard Drive for Mac - Silver

From what he tells me he never has no problems when mixing video. I was going to get this one but they told me the G-DRIVE MOBILE USB 3.0 was faster and better for what I was trying to do

As others already pointed out: USB 3.0 is still fairly new and working out issues.

It's also *possible* that you have a defective drive. It happens.

When you access files from that drive OUTSIDE of Scratch Live (Finder Preview, for example) do you see similar things happening?

I have had nothing but problems with USB3. I had the same beachball a few times, but, often after 20ish seconds, it would recover. I count myself lucky.

I then tried thunderbolt, and I had trouble daisy chaining the thunderbolt to hdmi adapter.

I returned it, and went firewire 800. Everything works perfect. I'm using a GTech 6TB - I love the fact that it is not plastic, and has fans to keep things cool.

If you are worried about speed - just keep in mind that the specifications of the connection are always limited by the speed of the drive. Unless you are rocking SSD externals, you can, for rough estimate, expect the max speed of a harddrive to be around 120MB/sec. So, USB3, Firewire, and Thunderbolt are actually going to be roughly (+ or - 20%) the same speed for a single external drive.

This only changes as you move into RAID type externals with more than one harddrive. For VJ use - you won't notice a thing.

I don't think its the drive unless they both were defective...

Thank you very much, I am going to go with this one and try it out and see if it works. My friend uses it for his video mixing and never seems to have a problem, what do you think?

Western Digital My Book Studio 1 TB USB 2.0/FireWire 800/400, Desktop External Hard Drive

Good choice. I'm not thrilled with the lack of a fan, but lots of people seem to use them with very good results.

Just keep in mind that your retina Mac does not have a firewire port. You will have to use a thunderbolt to firewire adapter. (Sold separately, of course :P )

Give it a shot - let us know how it works...

You pay all this money for the newest MacBook & you think they would put one in there! What kinda of computer do you use Dave? Thanks for all your help by the way.

The thing with technology is, new doesn't mean stable or cheap

Another reason to not get the stupid Retina model.. SO glad I opted for the old body style this year.

DJPuma - sad but true.

DJ Rozz - I'm rocking a 2012 macbook pro, but not the retina. I like user serviceable and upgradable machines. I went for the high resolution screen, and I'm perfectly happy. Saved a lot by not going Retina in terms of cost, too.

I did not realize it at the time, but I am enjoying having Audio In (to record your sets), too.

On the flipside, you do have two thunderbolt ports...

They are big ass bricks..but the perform SOLID I have 3 2tb Mybook studios and 2 4tb mybook studios

I may want to get those!

I believe its your USB 3.0 external drive. I had a gig with my new Retina this weekend doing video on a FW 800 external and no freezes whatsoever. But then, I ran ME. However, I did play with Video this week at home for about 30 min and noticed no freezes.

I have the same macbook retina with a usb 3.0 hub and a seagate desk 1.5 tb usb 3.0 adapter with no issues like yours. It runs smooth and doesn't crash.

It could be that hardrive of yours. Try running the buffer test using the blackmagic disk speed test (free) app on the Mac app store.

Post how fast your read and write speeds are here so we can see if that's the issue.

I have a MBP retina and run with no issues (itch and SV)


Just curious on you HD
- what's it formatted as?
- I got a LaCie drive and it had a bunch of stuff on it. - I reformatted mac - journalized
I know another drive I had was preinstalled with some file vault protection crap - I wiped the drive b4 I used that one (that's my home external)

I think that could be your issue.

I never formatted my external, I simply bought the app to write to windows NTFS file system called Paragaon NTFS. Works great and I don't have to worry about most of my externals since they are cross platform thanks to this driver.

My read and write speeds are higher with this driver. It cost $20 bucks but so worth it.

If SL freezes when you unload a track (load another track) and it tries to write to the song tag, that's where most issues start because some externals aren't formatted correctly and the right driver or formatted external are needed to write the tag to the song.

I have been on the Retina for 2 months.

Its been working flawlessly... up to 25 hours a week.

I play video using M.E, Arena and Madmapper + Im on line with Syphon cameras and no major issues and most def no crashes.

Sounds like a dodgy mac or HD?

I'm using a 2014 MacBook Pro (8GB ram) 1TB internal HD. I have all of my vids on my internal and experiencing same. :-/

where do you source your videos from?

I usually set the VCR to record TRL on MTV for all of the popular stuff.

ROFLMFAO....

Sounds like your external I had this same problem with my drive it would take awhile for videos to load. I changed the ext drive cable to a usb 3.0 and it works terrific now. If you get a ext drive with firewire than your Mac will need a FireWire port unless there's another way. And like everyone said run a test with the videos on your macs drive if you don't get the same problem then it's the ext drive. Problem solved👍

I always use a Thunderbolt HD and I never have any isses.

You record tv!? Are you DJING kids bday party's ? Do you play the ads as well? Lol

I can't use the LaCie thunderbolt drive I have on my retina. It's not ssd and I'm assuming it can't keep up so just keeps ejecting ! Boo

I remember going to a HUGE video night party in Prague back in 99 where the VJ was playing all the tracks off stuff he grabbed on VH1/MTV hehe.

We've come a long way since then.

I keep my videos on my laptop not external...

I get my videos from different sources but mainly from other VJs who produce remix videos. Some I get from Promo Only, others from Viemo.

Another issue I've been running into a lot... If I ad text or a graphic over the vids, Serato will eventually freeze completely and then just stops and closes out in the middle of a song. This happens every single time I ad my logo image or text on top of some background graphics.

I just really started using serato video a fewhile months ago and I'm having the same exact problem with freezing is serato going to fix this situation?, you would think with all the constant updates this wouldn't be an issue anymore.

No Serato Video hasn't been updated in a long time. I don't think we'll ever see an update in the video realm that's why Mix Emergency came along.

That's really messed up, ME is only compatible with Mac not PC smh, I have a Dell 17R Inspirion with Windows 10 along with 8 GB of RAM, Intel Core i7, Intel HD Graphics card.

Unfortunately these graphics cards are a long shot when it comes to pc and Serato video. Serato video needs a very high spec video card which is a dedicated video card. You are using an integrated video card. For example the 15" MacBook Pro's have 2 video cards the intel iris graphics and the nvidia card for high performance. You only have 1 video card so it's not switchable to use a high spec card like a MacBook Pro can I don't think you'll have much luck with what you have. Serato video uses a lot of processing power which is why most VJ's are on Macs. You should of done some research on Serato video and know that Macs have a better track record for mixing video. Hope you find a solution though.

I'm reading that Mac users are having problems with the software as well

I haven't had much problems I make sure the video files comes from legit video pools.

Update: The past two nights I have gotten frozen videos. This is odd cause they are all from legit sources and the videos play fine in other media players. I'm starting to think something is wrong with 1.9.6 and Serato Video. I noticed if I doubled the same video to the other deck the freeze would stop and video would play where it left off. No music stops but the video is def freezing. I also had two SV crashes with the yellow code crash pop up. I ignored it and just refreshed Serato. It seems to be happening more now than before.

So far the only work around for freezing videos is to instant double that same video then it works again. On occasion I had to do this at least 10 times tonight. So I'm experiencing this video freeze problem as well.

@DJ Tecniq, @dainfamous

As Kane D said...

Have done so and sent a clip of SDJ corrupting my files and crashing no resolve yet. Just fix the bugs we all know by 2.0 Serato Video will no longer be supported as its ancient w/no bug fixes or updates. If that's the case you should discontinue product ppl are getting ripped off.

I agree, I too is having this problem and I just paid for the damn thing.

Can we have a graphic or video sample play automatically when we mix a video track to an audio only track?

If you mean "can I link a ambient footage or a video clip to an audio file?", yes you can do that, it's in the SV documentation.

thats what the media crate is for @ 1:55 in youtu.be

Anyone still getting these screen freezes it's def still happening on my 2014 retina mbp. Support has been no help.

Anyone still getting these screen freezes it's def still happening on my 2014 retina mbp. Support has been no help.