Direct to Disk live capture help.

Hello all,
I require the collective knowledge of this user group!

I'm working for a client that would like me to set-up her Canon XH A1 to record a dance competition, and would like me to do a direct to disk capture. I don't know how to set-up Final Cut Pro 6 to capture a live feed. Please help!

A 1000 internets to you!

I do this with SDI, not Firewire, but I think the process is the same. Set your device-control preset to "non-controllable device," open up log-and-capture, and hit the "now" button.

And be sure to set your capture disk to INTERNAL or it will give up the ghost and drop millions of frames, in my experience.

Record as DVCPro HD.

Harry

Harry Bromley-Davenport.

You would need to connect with Firewire of course to the computer. Best if you used an external drive and set that as the scratch disk for the project to allow smoother capture without a slowdown.

i havent tried this with HD, but you can try it. Ive done this with DV. You open Capture, and you should see the live feed. Keep the camcorder on Camera, not Playback. Choose your settings and you may have the set the capture settings in the window to NON-CONTROLLABLE DEVICE. To capture, choose CAPTURE NOW.

Best of luck.

I would have them set the camera to downscale the footage to DV Anamorphic. Capturing live HDV streams has caused problems in the past for me and its not exactly real time anyway. Plus, im sure this is only going to a DVD anyway right? They wont know the difference if it was shot at 1080 or 480 as its all 480 on the delivery anyway.

In fact, it's very easy to tell the difference between footage that's been compressed down to DV and then converted to MPEG-2, and footage that's been compressed from HDV straight to MPEG-2 for DVD. It's a chroma subsampling thing.

HDV and DV require exactly the same bandwidth; they're both 25 Mbps formats. So if you can capture DV over Firewire, you can capture HDV over Firewire.

(The same is not true of playback; HDV requires quite a bit more processing power to play back in real time.)