Macworld Forums

Dear all

I have a deeply frustrating capture problem.
I used to work on a 5 year old G3 (OS9) with FCP2 using an 80GB external LaCie drive.
No problems in either straight capture or Batch capture.

Recently the place I work at have moved onto G4 Dual 1.2 GHZ 1024 MB memory with FCP3 and OSX. The 80GB LaCie drive refuses to do straight capture and takes 4 or 5 attempt for every shot in the batch capture citing dropped frames.

Therefore because I needed to keep the material on the 80GB drive I bought a brand new LaCie 200GB drive which man in Shop guaranteed worked with FCP no problems.

The G4 above will now capture direct but batch capture again causes 4 or 5 attempts for every shot citing dropped frames.

They also use a PowerPC G4 laptop 867 MHZ with 256 MB memory.
This will capture direct but will freeze on attempted batch capture.

I am using the Sony DSR 11 deck to digitise from. There is no problem digitising to the internal drive.

Having the project file on the hard drive sometimes seems to resolve the problem – but this defeats the point of having my projects and media on a drive I can take away with me.

What on earth is causing this problem with the batch capturing. How can I stop it!?! Any suggestions gratefully received.

Thanks in advance
Jasper

Jasperus,

This is a tough one.

Here's a few suggestions.

(1) try firewie basic instead of Apple firewire

(2) check your tapes are recorded at the same settings which you have set in FCP ie 48kHz or 32kHz

(3) is it happening with all tapes or just a few. Could be errors on the tapes you are using for some reason

(4) This is obvious, but check nothing ridiculously simple is out of wack with the DSR-11 like being set to NTSC when it should be set to PAL

(5) increase the pre-roll time for cueing tapes - set in preferences. This may solve the problem.

Maybe try calling Apple support.

If all else fails switch off the "Abort on dropped frames" warning in preferences. Sometimes a single frame can be dropped at the beginning of capture and FCP will then abort. My system works fine but I have seen instances where this needs to be done.

Let me know how you get on.

Rick

RickYoung,
Thanks for those suggestions. I have just tried the whole set up, tape deck, 200GB drive, wires etc with another person's older G4 laptop and it worked perfectly!!!
All the settings are the same as the ones I use on the other computers so I cannot understand what is making them fail.
However they have more software installed such as suitcase, photoshop, illustrator, etc but I always quit out of all of those before using FCP.

I am totally confused – any help most welcome.
Jasper

Any further ideas?

Jasperus,

Switch off the "Abort on dropped frames" warning in preferences. Sometimes a single frame can be dropped at the beginning of capture and FCP will then abort.

Try this. It may give you a means of working.

Rick

After doing as Rick suggest's have you got the Lacie Drive in line with the DSR11 - i.e. daisy-chained?
Try putting the DSR in one port and the Drive in the other.
We have got customers running on a iMac700mhz with twin drives attached to the Firewire and a DSR50!!!!
Try making the lead-in slightly longer before capture. It does sound like a pure software problem. Normally the hardware behaves and LACIE drives are normally very good.

Regards
Jim