Capturing DV to FW800 External Drive

I have an iMac with a FW800 port and a Canon GL2 using final cut pro 6.0.4; so I need to capture footage from a MiniDV camera to the firewire drive. The drive is a brand new G-Raid2, 1TB. I cannot do this however. I can do it only if the Graid drive is unplugged and only to the system drive, this is not good practice, I know. Final cut pro freezes with the drive plugged into the fw800 port and the minidv deck plugged into the fw400 port. I was wondering why this is happening. Is it because the fw800 and fw400 share a bus? Someone help me out because the reason I got an iMac is because of its fw800 port so I capture to a fw800 drive.
Message was edited by: AppleADay

What you are experiencing is the result of Canon's junky implementation of the firewire protocol. You are correct in your guess that the Mac has only one firewire bus to support all firewire connections and Canons often do not play well with other devices on the same bus. The solution to your problem involves isolating or eliminating the camera.
You have three solutions.
1. Disconnect the external drive, capture to the internal, disconnect the camera, reconnect the external drive, move the material to the external, edit.
Reverse this procedure if you wish to export video back to tape. Oh, and be sure to shut down the computer as you do any cable swapping - firewire cables carry voltage and you can fry a port.
2. Get a non-Canon camera or tape deck to use as the capture device. Sonys and Panasonics will most likely play fine with other devices on the same bus. (Though, it is really not recommended)
3. Get a computer that has the ability to add a second firewire bus via 3rd party cards (i.e. MacBookPro or MacPro).
Good luck,
x

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