Z1U / FCP / PowerBook FireWire issue solved!

I thought this info would be of interest to anyone who is experiencing similar problems to what I have!

I recently bought the Sony HVR-Z1U camera and have been shooting HDV footage. Since Monday, I've been trying to downconvert to SD & batch capture (my logged best takes) into Final Cut Pro 5.0.2 - using the camera in VTR mode. I'm using: the Z1 in VTR mode - a PowerBook G4 1Ghz (titanium) - a 250GB Lacie D2 Extreme drive.

No matter what I did - I could not get Final Cut pro to see the Z1U when it was set to play out in DV Cam mode!! It only recognized the camera when it was set to play out in full HDV resolution. It's been a night mare and for a while it seemed like my only option was to capture and entire tape in HDV and then to convert that huge 10Gb quicktime into another huge 10GB SD Quicktime - a megga schlep that took about 6 hours of processing time per tape!

After a few hours on the phone to apple tech support - I discovered that the problem was fire wire related.

Here's what happened:
1.) The PowerBook was connected to a Lacie 250GB D2 Extreme drive via a 6pin (into PowerBook) to 9Pin (into Lacie) cable. (THIS WAS THE PROBLEM - THE LACIE & THE POWER BOOK HAVE ONLY GOT ONE 6 PIN PORT EACH!)

2.) The Z1U was connected to the Lacie using the iLink (firewire) cable that comes with the camera. This cable has a 6 Pin plug which goes into the computer / drive.

3.) Because the iLink cable from the camera to the Lacie is 6 pin and because other cabel from the Lacie to the Powerbook was a 9 Pin TO 6 Pin - Final cut pro was not recognizing the Z1U as an A/V device! This is inspite of the fact that OS 10.3.9 could see the HVR-Z1U - as I noticed in the System Profiler / Hardware / Firewire.

The solution was so obvious - all I had to do was disconnect the drive and plug the camera directly into the PowerBook - bingo! No more problems - FCP could now recognize the Z1 in DVCam mode. Obviously FCP also has to be set up correctly to read DV-PAL or DV-NTSC in the Audio / Video settings.

Because I have one of the older generation PowerBooks (Titanium) which only has one 6 pin fire wire port - I cannot go from the powerbook to the Lacie to the camera as one would normally do. People with PowerMacs or Macs that have two 6 pin firewire ports will obviously not have this problem as they will be able to plug the camera into the one and the drive into the other.

At present I am happily batch capturing the SD PAL clips that I want to use using the desk top as a scratch disk and then moving the stuff across to the drive to clear up space on the PowerBooks hard drive. I wont hassle with using the media manager to re-connect (because it doesn't work perfectly) but will rather just drag the separate folders for each tape from the Lacie into my FCP projects browser. This is obviously a less than perfect solution and I will clearly have to optimize / de-frag my hard drive when I'm done - but at least I'm up and running!

I hope thats useful!

Best wishes,

Adrian



Think solutions!

Adrian,

GREAT trouble shooting. Just out of curiosity, what about using a firewire hub instead of daisy chaining?

Steve

Hi Steve,

A Fire Wire hub would possibly work. I haven't tried it and it's the next step for me. I did my daisy chaining last night and it left me with a "severly fragmented" PowerBook. It's a good thing I own the Norton Utilities 8.0.2 disk which I'll use to defrag (optimize) my drive tonight.

I would recommend this disk to anyone who does video editing on a Mac & OSX. I've had guys in the apple store (Regent Street London) tell me that Mac OSX optimizes for you as you use it and therefore there is no need for the disk. I don't buy that for one second - and infact when I put in the Norton Disk it shows you graphically exactly where you stand in terms of drive Fragmentation. Note: if you do get it - make sure you get Version 8.0.2 which works with OSX 10.3 and up - version 8 only works with 10.2 but Symantec swapped it for me for free. Note: I don't know if this version works with Tiger... but you could probably find out on the Symantec site or by emailing them.

Kind regards,

Adrian



Think solutions!

I don't personally use Nortons anymore - although I did years ago and it was good then - but I have heard enough problems assosciated with it to bother saying maybe don't go down that path. Diskwarrior and Techtool are both good disk repair tools.

Do a search on the forum for the word Nortons in the body of messages and you'll see what I mean.

Adrian,

I'm using almost the same set up you have. G4 Powerbook (actually still running FCP3) and LaCie drives daisy-chained for storage. I'm also using LaCie's PC FW800 card which plugs into the PCI slot on the Powerbook to connect all my drives. The camera/deck plugs directly into the PB's own firewire port. This has been working well since I set it up earlier this year, about six months ago now.

Now, if anyone knows where my second audio track has gone when I downconvert HDV from the Z1U to edit in standard (DV) mode, I'd be really grateful...

Keith

Hi Keith,

I know that Final Cut 5 had various improvements that were designed to work with HDV so it might be a Final Cut 3 issue. Here is an article about project settings in Final Cut 5 - but most of it will probably also apply to Final Cut 3. Maybe it'll be helpful.

[www.kenstone.net]

Adrian



Think solutions!