FCP 5 freezes upon break of timecode

Question

Wondering if anyone has had a similiar experience with FCP 5 freezing (spinning beach ball of death) after initiating a log and capture - once the timecode breaks (and remains broken) having the application freeze, and the only way out is to perform a force quit?
Stopping the camera/disconnecting it from the computer/turning it off keeps the machine frozen, and pressing the escape key doesn't work either. My PB has just recently been formatted, with a fresh install of everything.
Your help would be much appreciated - I don't want to have to capture in iMovie forever! (This has been my workaround until now.)

Answer 1

Hi Folks, I am new to your discussion group and would like to get back to the original topic if that's O.K. I am new to FCP and have just recently wanted to check it out. I started with v.5 and have been having the same problems several of the others have had. First of all I know what a deck is and have been editing for years with the Media100 system. As soon as I tried to digitize with FCP5 the software stops a few seconds into the clip ( which is not at the very beginning of the tape) and says it has detected a timecode break. I escaped the capture and went frame by frame. There are no timecode breaks. I am not talking about a camera stop which would cause a break, I am talking about the middle of a scene. I checked the preferences and told it to "make a new clip" It is supposed to go to the break and create a new clip and go on. It did not do this. These are clips where I set the In's and Out points. I
decided to tell it to continue and see if it would get past the break. In the pre-roll it suddenly found a new timecode break and stopped again. It never did get past the timecode break. It did not save any of the clips it was supposed to keep. I aborted the capture when it wanted me to O.K.the 33rd clip and I was still on the same 1 minute of video. I assume since the capture was eventually aborted this was the reason it did not keep any of the clips. The software never stopped the same place more than twice. It seemed to be telling me I had a roving timecode break. I checked the tape, there are no breaks.
I spent 2 days trying to get it to digitize properly. I trashed all 4 preferences in the preference file of the user pane at least twice. I turned off the "stop at drop frame" option. I safe booted the machine and repaired permissions. I went back to the user pane and told it to "Warn me after capture". I played with all those settings with no joy. After changing the setting to warn me after capture I digitiized 3 clips sucessfully and the forth clip and beyond had timecode breaks again. Again I checked the tape frame by frame and there are no breaks. I tried to capture 1 clip at a time, without success and Logged and Captured also without success. Actually there were a couple clips that had no breaks but the software completely ignored the Out Point I had set and ran 5 minutes over before I aborted it. As a further test I went back to Media100 and the capture went off without a hitch. On the clips that were successful the audio sounds like crap. The audio drop outs were enormous. Mixdown helped only marginaly.
My equipment startes with a Sony DSR-80 DVCam deck. The signal is routed thru a matrix switcher to an AJA IO LA box and into my G5 duel processor thru firewire. I am capturing to a G-Raid not my hard drive.
I don't know what else to try. I have posted on the Boston User Group and the LA User Group. No one seems to have a solution other than doing a Capture Now with the setting of Uncontrollable Device selected. This is not the way this software is supposed to work. Is there a bug in the FCP5? There are a lot of people having this same issue after they upgraded to V.5. I did not have an earlier version and started off with v.5 I would appreciate any thoughts. Is there anything I missed trying? Sorry about the book. Its been along week of trial and error.