-
Canon XL-H1 won’t connect to FCP in HDV
On going problem where if my XLH1 has an SD tape in it it connects fine (using “Firewire NTSC Basic” as the setting. But the minute I put an HDV recorded tape in it I get the message “Device is not connected or the capture preset is not setup correctly.” I have the Sequence Preset as HDV 1080i60, the Capture Preset as HDV and the Device Control Preset as HDV FireWire Basic. The blue light on the Canon is on indicating HDV available, but it’s not seen by FCP at all. I just shot five hours worth of HDV material that I need to get into the computer. What am I doing wrong? Is there a work around? I don’t really care about controlling the camera I just want to get the material in.
Thanks to Zane’s earlier advice I have just successfully re-installed Final Cut 5.1.4 on a brand new, from scratch installation of Snow Leopard 10.6.1. I have not yet imported any old documents, FCP projects or installed any other non- OS software on the computer, so I think it’s about as fresh as can be. Only thing I did was update FCP through “Software Updater”.
Thanks in advance.
-
4 Replies
-
There are numerous possibilities including the deck being set to downconvert to DV on output.
Firstly you need to make sure the camera/deck is properly set. I recall that this was always tricky with the canon cameras and 5.1.4 .
I question though installing an old version of FCP on Snow Leopard. To me that is asking for trouble particularly as you are mixing old software with new quicktime. If you updated FCP as well then I am sure you will have no trouble.
-
I’d love to upgrade FCS but that’s not feasible at this time…do I need to go back to Leopard? Some other work I do wants the upgrade.
-
Follow up: Taking Michael’s suggestion I checked out my Down Convert setting. Down convert was set to “OFF”, I tried changing it back and forth and reconnecting the FireWire (Tidbit: You can’t change this setting with a FireWire plugged into the camera), still no luck. I then tried turning Down Converting “ON” and reconnecting, and the connection works fine, I am downloading using an NTSC 48 Hz Anamorphic setting and it looks right so far. I do realize I am not working in HDV which is not what I intended. Don’t really know how much this matters? I don’t have any short term plans for taking this to blue ray mostly it will be viewed on standard DVD and secondarily on the web, presumably QT H.264. I alway think it’s best to stay as high resolution as possible as long as possible, but maybe I’m wrong.
But if FCP 5.1.4 is intended to work with HDV there must be a way to get this material to work.
-
Jeff, I remember that when I used to capture from the H1 into FCP vers 5, I used the HD SDI output and controlled the camera via firewire but I had to set it on downconvert via firewire to control the camera.
I wonder if proper ingest via firewire for this camera came after vers 5.1.4?
It isn’t ideal to be capturing as DV, but as you are capturing off tape with timecode control, it will be possible later to recapture as HD if needed.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up