FCP won't recognize deck

I'm pretty savvy with Macs and have used FCP for the past six years. But this has me completely baffled. One day, my FCP would not recognize my Sony DSR-20 deck, so to start with I tried four other cables. No luck. I went to Apple's site and found the document indicating I should remove the Quicktime receipts with numbers. Did that. No luck. I took another drive, wiped it clear and reinstalled the system and upgraded back to FCP 4.5 HD, OS X 10.3, and Quicktime 7.1 (all the settings I had before which worked fine for many months). Still, no luck in FCP recognizing the deck. I then took another drive and rebuilt it from scratch on another computer, installed in into my FCP computer. No luck. No matter what I try, FCP does not recognize my deck (nor does it recognize either of my Sony miniDV camera). Does anyone have any idea what is going on? By the way, I took the deck to a friend's house and it came up fine on his FCP system, so it is not the deck, and one of the firewire cables was brand new.
Stan

This is starting to come up a bit too much for comfort. Have you tried hot plugging your camera? Some people have reported this works.

Also, can you test if the firewire port is OK with a drive or something?

I have tried hot plugging both the deck and cameras. No effect. All firewire outlets from the computer operate my external firewire drives. so it is not (apparently) the computer's firewire outlets. Man, I am stumped.

The difference is that a drive doesn't go through QuickTime Services.

There are some common threads.

FCP 4.5, QT6 and Panther play well together. FCP5, QT7, and Tiger do well as a group. Cross any of those at your peril. Crosses produce many unstable systems.

<<<I took the deck to a friend's house and it came up fine on his FCP system, >>>

And what was his system configuration?

Koz

Koz is right. There were issues with Panther and 4.5. What config did your friend have might answer the question here.

Meant issues with Panther, 4.5 and QT 7

Michael Horton
-------------------

Thanks, friends. I willcheck out my friend's system. However, when it crashed it had been using the same setup for over a year without any problems. Is that strange or what?

<<<Crosses produce many unstable systems.>>>

Note I didn't say crosses produce broken systems, I said they produce unstable systems. "This was working last week...."

For a while there, every other post was, "I upgraded to QT7 and my camcorder dropped dead."

Just to cover the bases:

--Thursday night you went home and everything was working. Friday morning you came to work and the deck was invisible--and the machine was off overnight.

--The deck works on other similar systems.

--You tried more than one FireWire cable.

--You can write to and read from an external FireWire drive connected to any port.

--The deck is still invisible with **no other** FireWire devices connected.

--You did no changes or upgrades to the system. No software installs, no program modifications.


One more idea. Can you capture video with Final Cut off?

Close everything. Launch QuickTime Pro with the deck connected. File, New Movie Recording, Device Native. Roll the deck manually with a good tape in it. Do you see the video in the preview window? Can you capture some of it?

Koz

i have the same problem...
just updated to FCP 5.1 ... now cannot reconize camera!
in response to KOZ:

1. QT 7.1.3 does NOT see my DV deck... it does see my QUICKCAM...
2. iMOvie DOES see my DV deck & records...

very strange... and i DID delete the QT RECIEPTS

thanks
rd