Final Cut Express problem w/ Daisy-chained Firewire

Question

I have recently encountered an issue with attempting to capture video from a DV camera daisy-chained through drive on a 24" iMac.
I have two drives attached to my 24" iMac - a La Cie d2 Extreme by FW800 and a generic FW400 drive. I would like to run my camera daisy-chained from either drive (so the drives themselves are plugged directly into the iMac). However, when I do this it tells me there is no video (all the VTR functions work though). If I unplug the FW400 disk from the iMac, daisy chain it off the FW800 drive, and attach the camera directly to the FW400 port, it captures nicely.
Funny thing is that iMovie will capture daisy-chained without a problem.
Any fix for this? If this is expected behavior (it shouldn't be -- even my old Linux box didn't have this issue), will I experience similar problems if I get a FW hub? If this is not expected behavior, is there a fix?
I have another problem in that sometimes FCE stops tracking the timecode. What happens is that at some point, FCE stops capture and jogs the video saying it can't find the time code -- then it gives up and tells me it can't capture because there's no video. I can't even rewind and capture the chunk of tape I captured earlier. I have to quite FCE and try again.
Again, iMovie doesn't have this problem (though, if I understand correctly, it doesn't deal with the timecodes like FCE does). Any fix for this one?

Answer 1

I was just a bit confused with the capture bug. The same camera has been used dasiy-chained off the same physical drives under Windows and Linux without a problem -- not even a single dropped frame. iMovie can capture in the daisy-chained configuration, only FCE (3.5.1) has a problem (finds camera, VTR works, says there's no video).
The TC issue has nothing to do with the timecode on the tape -- that's fine and without any gaps at all. If you try to capture the same tape, the error will occur at a different spot each time. Further, if you rewind the tape a little and restart FCE and start the capture again, it will capture right through the part where it had a problem and go for a random amount of time before it hits another error. It's absolutely necessasry to restart FCE, because after it encounter's the timecode error once, FCE cannot capture any mode video (even from where it's captured before), though the VTR functions still work.
I've been playing around a bit, and it appears that FCE only has timecode errors when capturing to external hard disks. If you shutdown the external disks and set the capture scratch to the internal HD it works fine.
If you use any application other than FCE to capture from DV, the daisy-chain configuration works. Only FCE has an issue with this configuration.
I don't think it has anything to do with the camera, either. It's not only an approved camera, but I've borrowed a couple of others of different brands and noted the same problems.