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Powerbook & External Hard Drive Question
Yesterday I bought a 250GB 7200 rpm LaCie External Hard Drive & have attached it to my G4 Powerbook Laptop using the High Speed USB 2.0 cable that came with the LaCie.
In FCP 4.5 I changed the Scratch Disk settings & set them to a media folder I created on the LaCie. The problem is, when I go to capture clips the screen goes blank & I get an “Allocating Disk Space” message & it takes forever & the captured file is faulty & doesn’t work.
It’s possible I know to reset the Scratch Disk Settings, capture clips to my Powerbook & then copy them over to the LaCie Drive, as this is what I’m doing now. But I’ve been searching the archives on calf & cow & have read that this process can cause big fragmenting issues for my G4. Ideally, I obviously still want to capture straight to the external LaCie drive.
I hope this makes sense. Can anyone help me? Many thanks in advance, Nathan.
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5 Replies
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You can’t capture using a USB cable with FCP. You need to use a FireWire cable.
Todd at UCSB
Television Production -
Thanks for writing. Sorry, maybe I didn’t explain myself clearly enough. My camera is attached to the G4 via firewire. The external drive is attached to my G4 via USB. I’m just hoping to save my captured files to the external drive.
Any ideas? -
You explained yourself cleared; you didn’t understand the reply.
USB is not supported by Apple for use with video applications. You cannot use a USB connection for the purpose you want. The drive has to be connected via FireWire.
Depending on the drive and the camera try daisy-chaining the camera to the drive to the computer. This seems to work well for many cameras.
Make sure the drive has been correctly formatted. If it’s a new drive it may need to be zero-erased and reformatted for Mac OS Extended.
All the best,
Tom
Author: “Final Cut Pro 5 Editing Essentials” and “Final Cut Express 2 Editing Workshop” Class on Demand “Complete Training for FCP5” DVD
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…Tom get’s Todd’s rebound a makes a slam dunk!
LOLJust for a little more detail why. Although USB2 has enough speed to use as a video capture device, Firewire also carries across the timecode info.
Tom, correct me if I’m wrong here, but USB cables cannot do that.BTW, are you working on a FCP 5 book?
Todd at UCSB
Television Production -
Todd & Tom. Thanks for your replies. Excuse my ignorance. Man, it looks like I bought the wrong external drive & should have gone one with firewire instead! Bummer!
How do I daisy chain exactly?
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