5 mins of capture

[Kevin Hamm]

I can think of several reasons,

Is your disk more than 90% full? If so, you’ll run out of space almost immediately.

When your capture ends, are you getting a warning dialog? Anything at all will enlighten us.

Are you running anything else that could be occupying the disks time?

Have you tried marking the in and out points and still using capture now? I know it sounds dumb, but it worked for me in the past.

The other option is to make sure you didn’t set the Limit Capture Now to 5 minutes – even after preferences are trashed for some reason this can stick around, so it’s something to check. You can also set it to 75 minutes and activate the limiter and see if that clears up your problem.

[Martin Gardner]

There is over 250 gigs of free space on my drive, after 5mins of capture the capture window just freezes. The capture seems unable to last any longer than the 5mins & there is no warning box & nothing comes up to tell me that there is a problem. The Limiter is set to 100 mins and the preference files deleted.

I have previously been able to capture as much or as little as I want.

[Kevin Hamm]

So how do you know something is wrong? Is it because the import stopped or because FCP actually crashes or do you have to check the capture scratch folders for your project’s most recent imports and see what it did with those files?

If it captures 5 minutes of good video, I think I might be able to help. If it captures crap video, I might have another solution.

First, let’s presume the captured footage is good: Dandy, so let’s do this. Set FCP to a non-controllable device and start playing your deck or cam, and then click Capture Now. See if that goes beyond the 5 minutes. There is no timecode, so it just might.

Now, let’s presume the captured footage is crap. Why you wouldn’t get a warning is beyond me, which is why I’m really hoping it’s not this solution, but what the heck, let’s try them all. Swap the firewire port you are using for the camera – if you can, go to the local computer store and get a PCI-x or PCI-express (whichever would fit your computer) firewire card, and try one of those ports. If this solves your problem, you’re not going to be happy unless the new card will cover your firewire needs – it means your firewire ports or the firewire communication bus, or both, are dying. Why would they die? Who knows. I just hope this isn’t it, it’s never a good sign.

[Simon Cadman]

I just came across this recently.
If you haven’t already found the solution, it seems that it’s a conflict between FCP 4.5 (which I’m guessing you’ve got) and Quicktime 7.3.

The solution – which i found on some apple discussion boards, seems to be to reinstall quicktime 7.2 as well as FCP. Apparently quicktime gets embedded in FCP file structure – or something. Some other ppl were mentioning that an OS reinstall might be necessary too.

Anyway, one workaround I’ve used is to capture with Quicktime Pro. Its obviously limited w/ no Batch Capture etc, but it works.

Simon