Capturing sound issues

We just bought A G3 powerbook pismo and upgraded it into a G4 powerbook. We want to use this a primary digitizing station.

When I capture Media I am capturing media to an External hardive and it seems to moving pretty slow, but it captures. Then when I play the media back the sound is there usually in the begining of each clip, but then falls off and all we hear is a extremely loud static noise reall loud!!! What is causing the problem? is the computer too slow to process information? the origial tapes play fine in bothe decks and camera decks

thanks role

What deck/camera are you using as your capture device? How much RAM do you have? How much storage on the external hard drive? Is the external drive properly formatted? What version of FCP? Are you using Capture Now or Batch Capture? You gotta give the details before anybody can even begin to narrow this down.

Iam using a JVC Dual mini dv S-vhs deck and I also had same problem with Canon 1 chip camera as a deck. The computer has 768 ram. The external drive has 280 gigs available out of a 300 gig drive. The external drive I found is formated at MS dos,but I am using a mac computer. I am working in final cut 4.5 HD and I used batch capture

thankks role

Step One: Reformat the external drive to Mac OS Extended (not Journaled). It's very bad policy to mix and match, use a FireWire drive across PCs and Macs. Once you use the drive with one platform, don't use it with the other unless you reformat it. What's the speed of the drive?

Where do you find out the speed of the external drive its Maxtor brand external drive also I have my startup disk drive set at Mac Os Extended (journaled) should I still set my External drive as only Mac os Extended?

Journaling makes a damaged drive much easier to rescue, but it does slow the drive down a little. Most of the time, anything that slows a video drive down is a bad thing.

Koz

I concur. Although I've been using journaled drives for several years without penalty. Every drive is different, though. Koz often makes the point not to completely trust an external FireWire drive -- just make sure you back up your materials.