• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  New to FCP — Setup Question

  Posted by Doug Normington on February 13, 2008 at 6:11 pm

  Hi!

  Thanks for checking this post.

  I just jumped in with both feet. I bought a MAC PRO portable and FCP Studio 2. I just spent the morning installing the software.

  I hooked up my external firewire drive and then I noticed… there is only one firewire plug on the MAC PRO… how do I plug in my deck at the same time as the external drive?

  Need both at same time.

  Thank you in advance.

  NORMCO

  Russell Lasson replied 18 years, 3 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Russell Lasson

  February 13, 2008 at 7:43 pm

  Couple of options.

  First to clarify, there is one firewire400 port on the front and one on the back. So you could use those two.

  Or you could loop the deck through the hard drive if the firewire hard drive has two ports.

  You could use a firewire800 (9-pin) to firewire400 (6-pin) cable to connect to the deck or drive.

  Or you could use a firewire800 drive instead.

  There are more options too, but that should suffice for now.

  -Russ

  Russell Lasson
  Kaleidoscope Pictures
  Provo, UT
• 

  Shirlyn Wong

  February 13, 2008 at 8:47 pm

  Hi,

  I can’t tell you the answer however my friend has similar problem. The FW400 and 800 share the same bus, therefore you cannot use them at the same time. Now it would make sense to connect your DVcam to the FW400 and hard drive to the 800. However you wont be able to Print to Video. Of course there is the USB port but that is too slow to run RT for tape output. The Mac people told her to get a SATA card so she can connect her hard drive that way however that not becomes costly.

  Is this some kind of stupid mistake Apple made when designing the MacBook Pro? Given the info I know seems like it….

  My suggestion to her if she wanted to avoid the SATA card is to export the final sequence with a high compression, like Animation, on to the system HD. Then import back into FCP and then out to tape. Of course in theory there would be some minute down compression but given DV is already compressed it might not matter… Thats my thought…. however don’t know if I’m right…
• 

  Russell Lasson

  February 13, 2008 at 9:38 pm

  After reading Shirlyn’s comments, I’ve realized that I misunderstood which computer you were talking about Doug.

  You said, “a MAC PRO portable and FCP Studio 2.” And I missed the word portable, meaning that you purchased a MacBook Pro, instead of a Mac Pro.

  So you can either:

  -Loop the deck through the hard drive
  -Use a 800 to 400 cable to connect to the other port
  -Buy a Firewire or SATA Expresscard to expand the ports on your laptop.

  -Russ

  Russell Lasson
  Kaleidoscope Pictures
  Provo, UT

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