Capturing to external HD

Is anyone else having problems capturing to external HDs with FCP6? FCP6 is no longer recognizing my LaCie HDs or my Western Digital HDs. This is a sparodic problem. I have a lab of iMacs, Mac Pros, old and new. Thanks

did you update? did you change your workflow? did you change your tape format? are you using firewire? how full are your drives?

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Still cant capture to external disc

so i spent the money and got a new macbook pro 2.33,
installed FCP 2,
have a 250G external drive on the Firewire 800.
same problem as before with a canon XH-A1.
will not capture to external drive,
reports "general error" when hit escape,
all looks good until then.
can capture to the system drive.
this seems to be a particular problem with this camera and a powerbook/macbook.
anyone got this combination to work?

Mark,
I have a MacBook Pro as yours, a Canon PAL MVX4i (same as NTSC Optura 600), and some FW LaCie.
Contrary to other people experience in general I have no problem whatsoever to capture to the external disks, if the external disks are LaCie FW400 Porsche (I have 3 of them I bought at different times, the last one a month ago) - It does NOT work instead if I try to capture to the LaCie Rugged 80GB (FW800)!
When I successfully capture to the LaCie Porsche drives they are all 3 daisy chained to the FW800 port with an adapter cable, and the protocol I use is Firewire PAL (NOT Basic, but the full featured one); it works with the camera either connected to the MBP FW400 port or daisy chained with the other 3 disks. BTW this same configuration works also with my iMac G5.
But when I tried to capture to the Rugged drive (it was connected by itself to the same F800 port) FCE and FCP were getting stuck when I tried to start capturing, and the only way to resume was to either disconnect the camera or to force quit FCx.
This is my experience. A few more notes.
The 2 ports in the MacBook are based on the same FW bus (you can check it in the System Profile), and this seems to be the problem for some Canon/LaCie configurations. That's why in general using a FW card (with a dedicated FW bus) should solve the problem, even if personally I never used it.
The common opinion is that in fact there is (in some configurations) some incompatibility between the Canon and LaCie FW protocols.
Piero

Cannot capture to external drive

been said before, by myself and others, here we go again.
Canon XH-A1 , HDV 1080i footage.
way back 6 months ago..
i couldnt capture to external disk on PBG4.
then i got a MBPro , still couldnt cap to external disk.
then i got a mac Pro , still cant cap to external disk.
at least it now captures to system drive,
at first it had unknown error, then just crashed on initializing log n capture,
reinstalled QT, trashed prefs, repaired permissions and kicked the dog.
APPLE!!!! FIX IT!!!

in the PBG4 it was a PCM FW400 card in the slot.
BUT,
if it will capture to the system drive then how would some supposed timecode problem prevent it capturing to an external drive?
so you reckon i should add PCIe FW card to the Mac Pro?
blimey..!!
also,
before changing to the MacPro FCP on MBP went crook,
adding a basic transition caused a crash,
re-opening the main sequence was gone,
finally found an autosave file in the trash!!
while i am here, other questions not answered elsewhere,
if i were to capture the camera's HDV tape info via component out into a Blackmagic card would that give a better overall quality?
would this make editing easier?
is there any difference in doing this (via cap card) versus changing the HDV to ProRes or PhotoJPG in the sequence?
Or,
would capturing from HDMI out (my camera doesn't have it, but just imagine),
into capture card, give a better quality image?
also,
would a card help with rendering times?
also,
since compressor is so slow and bad,
what is the best program to compress an excellent looking QT output file for writing a SD DVD?
so far the basic Visual Hub program does a better job much faster,
but still doesn't look very good on DVD,
what other programs are there?

Unable to capture to external RAID drive FCP 7

Here are my specs:
Model Identifier: MacPro1,1
Processor Name: Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.33 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MP11.005C.B08
Running:
OS X 10.5.8
Final Cut Studio 3 (recently upgraded from Studio 1)
At the end of last year I had a problem with capturing and upon research it seemed to be that the most recent update of QuickTime was not compatible with Final Cut Pro 5, which was causing my machine to not be able to capture at all. So we upgraded to Final Cut Studio 3 (FCP7) and part of the problem was solved but an issue still remains.
For over 3 years we have been using an external Raid drive as a capture scratch and we still have over 5 TBs free. The Raid is connected by SCSI. Earlier last year I was able to capture to the Raid drive without any problems but now the capture will freeze whenever that is set as the capture scratch. If I set the internal drive as the capture scratch it captures without any issues.
The problem is that using the internal as the capture scratch can only be a short term solution. The drive is only so large and I have a problem with finder if I try to move files from the internal drive to the external. Finder freezes up and I can't even force quit properly. So being able to once again use the external as the main capture scratch is the only real solution. The external is fully functionally and communicating with the Mac.
Any help with resolving this would be appreciated!

Off the top of my head, because I haven't worked with SCSI in years--
"The problem is that using the internal as the capture scratch can only be a short term solution. The drive is only so large and I have a problem with finder if I try to move files from the internal drive to the external. Finder freezes up and I can't even force quit properly. So being able to once again use the external as the main capture scratch is the only real solution. The external is fully functionally and communicating with the Mac."
Are you trying to move files while you have FCP open? The fact that simply moving files is giving you finder issues and freezing you up, says that all is not well with the scsi raid. You should not see that at all.
You might try powering down the mac and the raid, unplugging and letting the machine sit for a while to discharge the capacitors. Then try reseating the scsi card. (pull it out carefully and plug it back in.)
On another note, when you upgraded fcp, did you do a clean install?

How can I capture an externally hosted page as a variable ?

How can I capture the html or css of an externally hosted
page and use it as a local variable ? There's plenty of options for
doing it with local file but I can't work out how to go about it
when the file isn't on your cf server. Any ideas ?

Yes, of course.
{insert the sound of slapping oneself in the head here}

17" MacBook Pro freezes after Capture to external hard drive!!!!!! HELP!!

Ok, so i just got my new MacBook Pro and Final Cut Studio last week, and i was so excited, until this happened. I was trying to log and capture a clip to my 500GB LaCie Big Disk and everything seemed to be going fine until the clip got to the end of it's alloted time and then the computer just froze. When I closed the lid and let the laptop sleep and opened it again the clip is in place and everything seems fine. I tried capturing then w/ the LaCie plugged into the FW8oo port and my miniDV Deck plugged into the FW4oo, and it froze again after capture and then worked fine after closing the lid. Thinking I was crowding my Fire Wire bus I hooked up an external USB 2.0 drive and my deck to the fire wire , but the same thing happened. So then I tried capturing to my internal and it worked fine. I've captured to an external on my 17" iMac G5 w/ Final Cut HD for years and never had a problem. Any tips? This closing the lid thing just isn't going to work.
MacBook Pro 17" Mac OS X (10.4.6)

nope, david is right on the mark. powermacs with one firewire bus choke like this. i can't understand why apple continues to design with one firewire bus but i'm not a designer. anyone, ANYONE who uses firewire harddrives and firewire tape machines/cameras for editing NEEDS to invest in a seperate sort of firewire card (pick your flavor) and then we'd see this behavior go away. then there will be those that will whine "this never happened before!" it's happening now, firewire cards a cheap insurance against these issues.

Capturing using external HD via fire wire?

I just bought a lacie 80 GB mobile external hard drive. I want to begin capturing a new project... however I see only one fire wire port on my powerbook G4. So how do I connect my hard drive and camera, both of which are using fire wire?

Tom-
I also posted this as a seprate message-----
OK, I finally bought the correct-- at least I think it's the correct--- external hard drive (160 GB lacie). However, when I use "capture now" I get an "allocating disk space" message. This message usually stays up for a very long time with the spinning pin wheel, which results in only a small fraction of my video being captured.... if any at all.
I'm assuming this has something to do with the addition of the external hard drive... any suggestions?
Also, when I capture using clip it seems to work OK... sort of. Clip will capture the video, but only one channel of audio.

Captured to external drive, now iMovie won't work

I have a Mac formatted external drive and a friend (who is soon to become an ex-friend) talked me into capturing my movies on an external drive then editing from there (had been doing great up until then capturing to my internal drive). So I captured a 45 minute movie onto the external drive through the computer via iMovie. Used a Firewire 800 cable from the computer to the external HD and a 400 Firewire cable from the camera to the computer. It all went fine. Opened iMovie but instead of my normal event list, there were two folders marked "Event 1" and "Event 2". When I tried to clicked on the the first one, iMovie tried to "initialize" it but kept shutting down. I looked in the folder and the files were broken up into tiny 1 or 2 second movies which said "Q-DV". So I trashed those two folders then captured directly to the internal HD, but it did the same thing again! Made two folders which iMovie can't open. I looked in iMovie Preferences but don't see how to correct the problem. Have I ruined something?! I'm stuck. Can't do anything. Heeeeelllllp! (please)

Shame on me. I have to stop running to the forums every time some little thing goes wrong. Here's what happened: I tried to capture a project I had already rough cut on the PowerBook a few years back. The original was Super-8 footage which I'd had transferred professionally to a mini DV cassette. I had captured that on my PowerBook, done a rough cut, then transferred that to another brand new DV cassette. That's the one I tried transferring to the MacBook Pro. I'd done that before but with video originating from my DCR-PC100, so the source was DV. This morning I rooted around through my cassettes and found the original transfer cassette and tried capturing it directly to the internal drive of the MacBook Pro. It worked perfectly. So I guess the problem was the second generation capture of the Super-8 footage via the PowerBook (using iMovie2). However, I'm still dubious about capturing video through the MacBook (using the configuration I mentioned) to an external drive. Everything I've read so far about storing video on the external drive talks about moving it from the internal drive. I've yet to see anything about capturing to the external drive so I'm reluctant to ever try that again. Anyway, problem solved.

HDV Capture to External HD

Is this possible on the iMac? I am thinking about getting one in the future for HDV editing with a Canon XH-A1. I hear there are problems using two firewire devices on the iMac.
What external drives are recemmended for this workflow?

Try looping the camera's connection through the FW drive, then connect the FW drive to the iMac. It may or may not work. Depends on the drive... higher end setups such as those from G-Technology and Weibetech or CalDigit seem to work just fine doing this, but we've read here about some that don't... but give it a try.
If it drops frames or doesn't work OK, you could capture to your internal then after capture, connect the drive and move the media over to it using the media manager.
USB will not be fast enough at all for capturing video with.
Jerry
Message was edited by: Jerry Hofmann

Capture problem, external HD problem

Please, help!!! I stated having problem with capture from my mini DV Cannon. FCE 4.01 does not recognize it. My portable Lacie started to shut down too. I deleted and reloaded FCE 4.0. Capture was working, but I could not read the project that I managed to finish in 4.01. I upgraded 4.0 to 4.01 and started having the same problems. capture does not work, LaCie shut down. Help!!!!!

Hi
Just thinking.
• Your internal boot hard disk has > 25GB free space ? Important
• Your external LaCie - formatted as Mac OS Extended - UNIX/DOS/FAT32/Mac OS Exchange do not work !
• FireWire - USB/USB2 performs badly
• Energy Save - Turned OFF ! and so not to set hard disk to rest - not good when working with video.
• So goes for ScreenSavers too.
Yours Bengt W

Sound out of sync when capturing to External Hard Drive

I've been trying to capture my short film footage (5 - 60 min. mini dv tapes) on FCP without the audio getting WAY out of sync. All the footage is off. Any ideas? Here's some more info: I capture the whole 60 minutes of the tape at once. (And then I was gonna split it up later.) It all looks fine through the LCD monitor as it plays, but when I look at the footage after capturing, it's way off. I have a G-Raid, 500 gig ex. h/d that is empty. I have a PowerBook G4.
Can you capture it on your external h/d without this happening? Or do you have to capture on your internal? (which I believe, I don't have enough memory there.
Help, please, please, please.
- Michael

The best solution would be to use a DV capture utility and then import the resulting file(s) into final cut.
Aplle itself offers capture utilities, which can be found in the Developer Firewire SDK:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305924
You need a free Developer account and to download the SDK there. After installation you will find a new folder on your harddrive called "Developer"
There are several capture utilities in the program section of the SDK. You want to use the one called "VirtualDV". It´s very simple, but powerful though. It does capture without sync loss, compared to capturing via the Quicktime framework, like Final Cut and iMovie do. It simply grabs the raw DV stream coming from the Firewire interface.
After the capturing you have a Quicktime readable raw DV file, which easily can be imported to be worked with in any DV capable software.

HV20 Capture to External Firewire Drive

I'm here again, trying to help a friend who live in another country.
She says, "It seems that I can't capture footage from my camera (HV20) directly on to the external hard drive as my camera doesn't allow another firewire or
USB to be connected to the computer at the same time."
Any reason she would think this?
I know she's using a pre-unibody MacBook Pro with Final Cut Express. I don't know the details of the specs on hers (I will be asking her about that).
But shouldn't she be able to capture to an external Firewire drive? I'm thinking that when she plugs in the camera, the drive is no longer recognized. I'm in the process of getting more details from her.
Any help is very appreciated.

Of course she should be able to do it.
It should have 2 FW sockets, so she could use one for the camera and one for the FW HD.
Even if it had only one, she could daisy-chain computer, FW HD and camera.
A third possibility is to capture direct to the MBP's HD and then copy the media across to the FW HD. The media from a one hour tape can be copied in less than 10 minutes so it is no big problem.
P.S. I have a Canon HV20 and it never complains when I have 2 FW HDs and a USB 2.0 connected to my iMac!
Message was edited by: Ian R. Brown

Dropping frames capturing to external hard drive

When I attempt to capture video from my Powerbook G4 using my Lacie External drive as my Scratch Disk, I get the 'dropped frames' error message. However, when I capture through my IMac Desktop G5 onto the very same Lacie External drive I have no problems. Both the Powerbook G4 and the IMac Desktop G5 have about 20G of free space on each of their 80G Hard Drives. Any suggestions? Many Thanks!

There is a good chance that your problem is caused by
using the HD in USB 2 mode.
Most people consider USB 2 is unsuitable for video
editing.
DV needs a drive capable of a consistent high speed
that can only be provided by FW.
Although the claimed speeds of USB 2 appear to be as
high, they are not because they are the MAXIMUM
speeds achieved and are not sustained. In the real
world USB 2 is barely half the speed of FW.
When using your PowerBook you could try
daisy-chaining your camera to the HD to the computer
- by FW of course.
Ian.
Thanks! Great Advice!

Capturing to External Hard Drive

I am editing my video on a MacBook Pro with a 120GB hard drive which is not anywhere near big enough. However I have an external hard drive that is 500GB that I am trying to capture the video to. I set it up in the Final Cut system preferences but when I go to capture now it says allocating disk space and then freezes. I think the problem is that I am connecting to the drive via USB as opposed to firewire. But if Im importing video at the same time through the only firewire port how do I avoid this? Thanks.

Re: External HD ports: eject the drive, power off, switch the cable to the adjacent port, power up the drive then see if the computer recognises the drive. If it does both ports work. If it doesn't...
If ports are okay (it seems cables are fine as both camera and drive are currently recognised via firewire aren't they?). Shutdown laptop. power everything off and then power all back on and then startup. Make sure camera is in right mode and startup FCE.
If that doesn't work just out of curiosity you could open up iMovie and see if your camera is recognised through the HD there.
You could try connecting the camera directly via firewire to the computer and reminding us that it works that way (you were using USB earlier were you not?)
Keep us posted.
(ps I'm off to bed!)
M.

How to Capture to External

How do I capture to an external HD? Easy Setup captures perfectly to my MacBook, but how do I set it up to capture directly to my external instead? Do I have to install FCP Exp onto the external first? Step by step greatly appreciated. Thanks.

In System Settings you set the external drive as the scratch disk.

Capturing to external HD

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