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capture with express card
I am using a new firewire express card to avoid capturing material directly onto my operating system of my mac book pro 15. I want it to go my external Hard Drive directly. So everything seems to work but after a sample capture to the external HD I get “An unknown error occured” . The express works because I can go to the mac hd ok. Is there a setting or is this just not possible?
Thanks!
Mike -
19 Replies
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You don’t need a Firewire Express card actually. Just connect the drive to a firewire port on the MacBook and go.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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no, unfortunately that causes the capture to drop because the footage has to go the mac drive first and then back to the external and it does this on the same FW cable, thus dropping out, been there done that, but thank you very much.
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[RattleItFilms] “no, unfortunately that causes the capture to drop because the footage has to go the mac drive first and then back to the external and it does this on the same FW cable, thus dropping out, been there done that, but thank you very much.”
No it doesn’t go to the Mac Drive first. If you set the External drive as the Capture drive, then it goes directly to the External drive. Footage will only go to the Mac drive first if you set the Mac as your Capture Scratch.
If you’re trying to run a deck at the same time, you simply connect that to the external drive.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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[RattleItFilms] “no, unfortunately that causes the capture to drop because the footage has to go the mac drive first and then back to the external and it does this on the same FW cable, thus dropping out, been there done that, but thank you very much.”
Fundementally wrong, as Walter says. If you take the time to read the FCP manual, you would know that the express card is totally redundant. And when a forum mod on the Cow gives you some advice, it just may be right…
The Firewire bus will support the camera and the drive no problem. Just make sure you have your capture scratch disk set up right, like it says in the book and it should be ok. If you’re still having a problem, just ask.
You have got a very powerful and complete edit system – have fun with it. Be nice, and people around here may just be able to help you have more fun.
Rant over.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.Producer/Director “The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
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sorry if someone took something I said as not nice, capture scratch are set for the external drive, settings are matching, I still get the error ” an unknown capture error occured” the deeper I get with this tells me the more simple the problem…
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OK. Can you give us some more info?
What drive are you using, and what type of interface? We assume it’s firewire 400?
Are you now connecting the drive directly into the MacBook? Easier to troubleshoot if it is.
Is the camera connected to the passthrough on the drive?
Are your capture settings set to DV (Pal/NTSC as required)? If not, use Easy Setup to double-check this anyway.
When does the capture fail? Is it after capture finishes or during?Let us know.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.Producer/Director “The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
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The way I see it, Mike is right and Walter is wrong this time.
I don’t agree with Ben’s remark about moderators. They are many times right and many times wrong. Not to mention the unnecesary comment about reading the manual, since I think I will easily prove he’s wrong and making that kind of comment while being wrong….. 🙂Let’s see…
You connect a DV/HDV device and a Firewire hard drive to a MBP. You have to daisy chain them, since there is only one FW port.It is clear hat the information has to reach the CPU before going to the Firewire drive: FCP has to embed it in a Quicktime file container, flag it with metadata, even transcode it to other codecs in some cases (DVCPRO HD, AIC and Offline RT, for instance). In this scenario, this means going from the camera/deck through the hard drive (acting as a Firewire hub, not a hard drive, get it?) to the CPU and then from there again to the hard drive. The scratch disk setting only states that you want to use that hard drive, but doesn’t solve the bottleneck issue in which the hard drive has to act as a bridge between the video device and the CPU, given the lack of another FW port.
Express Card is essentially PCI Express in portable form. It has tremendous bandwidth, not just for Firewire 400, but also FW 800 and even SATA. These last two would be better alternatives. But the FW400 route should work. Maybe the drivers are too new or not well done, given how new the technology is?
Adolfo Rozenfeld
Buenos Aires – Argentina
https://www.adolforozenfeld.com
adolfo(AT)adolforozenfeld.com -
[Adolfo Rozenfeld] “Walter is wrong this time”
Don’t want to start anything, but how is Walter wrong? Mike bought an express card based on the incorrrect assumption that he needed one to capture DV on his MacBook Pro. He doesn’t need one. The FW400 bus has been used for years on the Mac for DV capture in this mode – FW400 can be used (as with the AJA IO) to transfer 10-bit uncompressed, albeit without the drive on the same bus. With DV, that’s just not a problem. If he wants to move up to a SATA drive, or use FW800, that’s a different kettle of fish.
I was trying to get someone who seems new to FCP and the MacBook going, after he started from the wrong place, as was Walter. ‘Read the Manual’ is perfect advice here, as it spends a considerable amount of time explaining EXACTLY how to connect a DV camera and external drive. If he’s having a problem using the express card, it’s a better solution, assuming (which we still don’t know) that he has a FW400 drive and a DV Camera. Without more info, how else can we help?
I’m off to sit in the sunshine. It’s my day off. mutter, mutter…
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.Producer/Director “The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
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Sorry. Felt I needed to clarify this.
[Adolfo Rozenfeld] “Not to mention the unnecesary comment about reading the manual, since I think I will easily prove he’s wrong and making that kind of comment while being wrong….. :)”
The manual DOES go so far as to say that SOME cameras will not work connected through a drive. But we just don’t know what equipment is being used here. In the majority of cases it does work. The advice in the manual is, I have to admit, incomplete, as it makes no distinction between single firewire drives and raided firewire arrays. Express Card FW interfaces are very new products, so the incompatability may be there. I’m sure the info in the manual about FW drives has been changed over the years, as it now spends so long extolling the virtues of SATA drives… (wonder why?!)
[Adolfo Rozenfeld] “The scratch disk setting only states that you want to use that hard drive, but doesn’t solve the bottleneck issue in which the hard drive has to act as a bridge between the video device and the CPU, given the lack of another FW port.”
And where exactly do you imagine the bottleneck is when DV has a bitrate of around 5Mb/s and firewire supports many times more than that? The problems with some cameras has nothing to do with this, just the firewire implementation.
Come to that, how do you imagine people like me (and there may be more than one) who have a Powerbook 12″ without an expresscard or PCMIA slot have been editing DV for the last few years? Every deck and camera I have used (mostly Sony and Panasonic) have worked.
Once again, if he tells us what camera and drive he is using to capture what format we could help. That’s help.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.Producer/Director “The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
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You know (it’s raining outside by the way), that section in the manual doesn’t explain this type of connection, which I think it used to. Anyone know if this is the case? Seems odd, as it’s the way many people have worked in the field for many years. I supppose that Apple feels that some compatability issues = don’t use it.
I think that’s wrong, as the alternative for laptop users is the use the internal drive, or use a cardbus. As I said, not every one has access to a cardbus (Macbook and PB 12″ users for example) so it seems incomplete to me.
Apologies for the ‘read the manual’ comment . It’s still incorrect to say it shouldn’t work, because it usually does, and most queries on the Cow about this are solved by checking the setup.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.Producer/Director “The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
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