Capture problems

Hi,

I have been having problems capturing from my DV Camera to FCP 3.0 (I use G4). I use firewire cable for the connection. Plugged into the other firewire jack is a firewire cable that goes from my tower to the external HD. When I have both firewire cables plugged in to their respective devices, FCP just doesn't want to capture DV. However, when I unplug the firewire to the external HD, it will capture tape with no problem.

Why is this happening, and is there anything I can do to keep both devices connected? I'd like to use my external HD as the scratch disk, but right now I obviously can't.

Because all macs ship with ONE firewire bus. No matter how many connections you have, there is only one FW bus.

The solution would be to buy a PCI firewire card that adds more ports and another bus. But, finding one for your old G4...that'll be tricky.


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Thanks, Shane, I will keep an eye out for that card.

What I don't understand is why in the past I have sometimes been able to have both devices connected, capture and at the same time save to other firewire device if I only have one functioning fw port.

> What I don't understand is why in the past I have sometimes been able to have both devices
> connected, capture and at the same time save to other firewire device if I only have one
> functioning fw port.

It's not a guaranteed failure. I've been using a DV deck and external FireWire drives simultaneously, with no separate PCI card, for years. But it's not a sure thing, either. It's one of those "at your own risk" deals.

That said, what brand of drive are you using? Some are better than others.

If you have enough storage on your internal drive, you could capture to that and then copy the files over to the external drive for editing. Work around having only one FireWire device at a time.


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My external HD is a LaCie 350 GB. My connection is FW400. I have heard that LaCie is problematic, but I didn't think this was one of those issues.

You are right, better to play safe and only have one device at a time. Thanks.