When capturing from a VHS tape via a capture device, I'm only able to capture a few seconds at a time. I forgot how to increase the size of the capture. I have no trouble when capturing via Firewire.

Power Mac G5, FCP5. 50 GB available.

Check your "capture device" manual and match the settings to the FCP Capture settings (also in the manual).

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

You want to use "Capture Now: in the Log and Capture window. You can change the time limit of Capture Now in the Preferences.

Hey, Joey, thank you. I can't find it in my Pinnacle brochure. Is it advanced pull down? That's the second capture preset after DV NTSC 48 kHz.

Maybe it's the fact that i'm using Log and Capture and FCP is trying to remember the entire tape. I'm using only Capture Now on a few takes, but I'm playing through a couple of hours. So when the tape runs in the VHS player for about ten minutes, the computer freezed -- it goes into the spinning color spectrum wheel. I've had to reboot my computer a few times already.

Any suggestions as to how to get out of this rut? :-)

Capturing from VHS means you have no timecode. Are you using Non-Controllable Device?

You only have 50GB left. The Spinning Beach Ball suggests to me that FCP is trying to use up too much disk space. One of the (many) evils of Capture Now is that it eats up a lot of storage while it's capturing, a lot more than necessary. Instead of increasing the "Limit Capture Now" quota, I actually suggest you take it down to eight, 10 minutes. That may prevent the system from trying to allocate 100GB of storage for the task. You said you were using Log and Capture so this shouldn't be happening, but it doesn't sound impossible if you're trying to capture from a 60-minute logged clip.

An even more obvious solution is to find a bigger drive. 50GB is peanuts when it comes to capturing, especially when you take the 10 per cent rule into account.


www.derekmok.com

Oh, wait a minute, what am I thinking? You can't log from VHS. No timecode.


www.derekmok.com

Thanks, John, Derek, but actually what Joey said I followed up on after I replied. I had never clicked on the tabs of of clip settings and capture settings :-) Can you believe that; I never needed them... Anyway, it was the "uncontrollable device" setting I had to choose -- as you also pointed out, Derek. So now hopefully I can capture NOW and be able to capture a few minutes for each clip from the VHS tape.

Where is the Capture Now quota?

System Settings. Same place where you set your Scratch Disks.


www.derekmok.com

I'm capturing a bit more -- like 30 second clips, but I get a log of crashes -- spinning wheel. Each time I press and hold the restart button until the computer shuts down, then restart after 30 seconds. Same thing over and over.

I'm not able to just view a tape via Log and Capture. The computer crashes without my doing anything when playing a tape and monitoring it. After a few minutes the sound goes out and then if I press capture, the spinning wheel appears and I'm looking at another crash.

This has never happened to me on this computer. But then I've never tried to look at so much VHS on my system before.

When capturing VHS through an Analog to Digital converter device or digital camcorder, you really can't start and stop playback. You need to enable it to Capture Now and press Play on the VHS machine then click start in the Capture window.

Once the data starts to flow, it is best to get it all in one shot.

Your other option is to capture the VHS to a digital camcorder as DV throught the internal converters on the camera to a tape, then you can Log and Capture like normal with Timecode.

Here's the crazy thing: I was able to capture without trouble in iMovie. Now all I have to do is convert the .dv to .mov