Can’t succed in capturing

[Enzo Tedeschi]

I’m doing capture now:
tried 3 mini DV tapes in row, all good , clean new tapes, and similar pattern:
after 15 seconds (on all tapes) FCP says stops the capturing, pauses the tape and says, ” dropped frames were detected on last capture attempt”

Is your HD fast enough?

(really weird thing today: my 700GB hardrive said it only have 2GB left, even though the whole drive was free — I deleted the FCP project file at that problems resovled, very bizarre)

Lots of aborted captured from FCP can result in orphan media files in your Capture Scratch, they all take up space and add up. Also, if you had 2GB left on a 700GB drive, and you were trying to digitise, this could very well be the cause of your dropped frames. Hard Disks slow right down after they get 75% to 85% full.

Enzo Tedeschi
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[Kevin C.]

thanks Enzo, understood almost nothing from your reply though.

[Dunwoody Lampton]

I believe what Enzo told you was:

Even unsuccessful attempts to capture various files end up turning into real files that take up real space. So your many aborted attempts to capture may be stealing valuable space from your hard drive, as well as the successful attempts to capture.

And when hard drive space is used and occupied beyond 75%, the speed of the hard drive begins to significantly diminish. The more room on your hard drive, the faster it operates.

Also, make sure your hard drive, FireWire ports and camera are all operating at the same relative maximum speed. If at least one of the three operate at a significantly slower speed than the other two, then this will have a negative impact on the capture process.

Finally, you said you received an error that your camera was not recognized. This may be a large part of your problem. Check Apple’s website for compatible devices for use with Final Cut Express. Your camera may not be compatible with FCE.

Troubleshoot the speed of your devices, the actual space on your hard drive, and the compatibility of your devices, and forget about the brand or quality of tape you are using.
I am going through some similar issues right now, but they have nothing to do with tape quality and EVERYTHING to do with speed, space and compatibility.

Good luck.

[Kevin C.]

thanks Shotsave for the more coherent post.
The analysis is wrong though. This is a 750GB hardrive with over 400 GB of free space. I only catpured a few seconds of video. Yet the hardrive said 748 GB of hard drive was used up. Bizarre. When I deleted the project file from hard drive, issue cleared up. Still don’t get that.

Now on issue of capturing.
Without fail, at 15 sec mark, all captures abort and the dialogue box that there are dropped frames comes up. This is across many tapes, that are hardly worn out. So I thinking for first time, of unchecking the preference to abort if there are dropped frames. I don’t like doing that, but what else can I do? The software seem to think that at 15-20 seconds in, of every tape I have there are dropped frames.

The “can’t recognize camera” only happened when I tried to capture in Quicktime. That never happened with Final Cut.

But another bizarre thing happened also: on one tape, capture aborted becuse of no footage on tape (and there was footage)

[Dunwoody Lampton]

Some of the other concerns you noted do appear “bizarre,” but are well out of the realm of my expertise.

However, as I type, I am experiencing a similar drive space issue.

After numerous capture problems due to what I believe were speed issues with my LaCie Porsche drive and Canon XL2 for playback, I switched to a LaCie d2 drive and had similar freezing every 20-30 seconds, until it finally “cleared up” for unknown reasons, and I was able to successfully capture without intermittent freezing.

However, upon trying to render a very SMALL amount of effects in a very SHORT timeline, I received the “insufficient space” warning related to the d2 drive, and FCE would not render.

I opened other projects and tried to render them, with the same result.

I copied about 80gb of files and projects to another hard drive, then attempted to render again, with the same error message. This, despite my d2 drive showing 90gb free.

I then used Disk Utility to write zeros over all free space on the d2, with the same result – refusal to render due to lack of space.

Finally, I noticed that, in addition to the successfully captured files, there were literally HUNDREDS of reference files with similar file names to the successfully captured files in my capture scratch folder. None of those reference files would open individually. I deleted all of them, thinking this would account for the still-occupied space, but found that FCE, upon re-opening the project, detected the missing reference files and immediately launched an automated search for them. Of course, they were trashed, so they were not found, but the timeline eventually did open and I was STILL unable to render because of insufficient disk space.

[Kevin C.]

Shot, I understood the gist of that, and it bring up issue did not think of, that it could be fault of drive.
I just got brand new Seagates 750 externals, I will test on my older Lacie d2 and see what happens. thanks

[Dunwoody Lampton]

More guessing on my part:

One week ago I began to experience the freezing-during-capture problem with my LaCie Porsche FireWire drive. Numerous posters suggested the speed of all my devices was inconsistent, and that the Porsche drive was the top offender. I maintained at the time that my LaCie d2 drive had NEVER experienced any kind of freezing problem.

Then, it finally hit my d2 drive a few days ago. So much for my theory.

However, I think I may have figured out a partial cause for the “insufficient hard drive space” issue: after I began troubleshooting the Porsche drive, I also began to screw around with the settings for “Free Space on Scratch Disk” and “Limit Capture” selections under “System Settings.”

Before receiving the “insufficient space” warning while trying to render onto the d2 drive, I reset the minimum “Free Space” values to the equivalent of 92gb. Unfortunately, there were only 89gb of space on the drive, so I believe that, when I started to render, FCE was CORRECTLY reading the setting that I had changed, which showed not enough minimum space on the disk. In reality, 89gb was MORE than enough space to render three effects, but because I had reset the value to 92gb in the System Settings, FCE took that value as reality.

So check your System Settings choices and make sure that they do not conflict with or overrule your actual hard drive space that’s available. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help. Good luck.