Capture From Sony HDV-Z1U FCP not seeing camera HELP

[Todd Skougor]

The HDV deck or camera must be sending video to the computer in order for FCP to see it. Try pressing play on the camera/vtr, then pause, then apple8 (capture mode). If you go into capture mode before you play/pause the deck it will give you a “failed to find device” warning.

Hope this helps,
T

[Todd Beabout]

Be sure to change your Easy Setup (in the menu under Final Cut Pro – top left of your screen) to HDV 1080i/60. After that when you open log and capture you should see the camera, and you might notice a very slightly different looking capture window.

That should get you.

-Todd Beabout
Vazda Studios

[Ric Christoferson]

Tried this several times… keep getting “unagle to initialize capture device” We have gone through the settings in the camera and most all of the settings in FCP…

FCP does see the camera and can load footage in DV NTSC Bacis but then we are not getting the 1080 60 thought the firewire….

any other ideas???

Has any one had success with capturing footage through Firewire, FCP 5.1.2 and the Sony HVR-Z1U in 1080 60i ????

thanks again

[Ric Christoferson]

Been there.. no luck with easy setup HDV 1080i/60 … “Unable to Initialize capture device”

thanks for your help.. any other Ideas??

ric

[Todd Beabout]

Hmmm… the only other thing that I can thing of is going to involve some of those wonderful in-camera menus that Sony likes so much. The camera has the ability to down-convert to DV on the fly, and that setting is most likely turned on.

I wish that I could remember more from memory about the camera’s menus, but I do remember that above where you plug in the firewire cable (iLink) there are 2 blue lights, one for DV and one for HDV. Obviously the HDV light should be on, so that is one way that you can check.

-Todd Beabout
Vazda Studios

[Henninc]

not sure if that’s true for the camera but on the sony hdv deck you have to
disable “auto” in the menu where you switch between hdv and dv mode (setting it to hdv)
to get the deck recognized by fcp.

[Ric Christoferson]

[henninc] “not sure if that’s true for the camera but on the sony hdv deck you have to
disable “auto” in the menu where you switch between hdv and dv mode (setting it to hdv)
to get the deck recognized by fcp.”

We have the blue light on the camera set to “HDV” … Have disabled “auto”…

still no control of deck…. in FCP… gee your guys are great … thanks for your thoughts…

any more??

ric

[Ric Christoferson]

I posted the wrong camera designation… Should be a HDR-Z1U Camera…

thanks

[Henninc]

I had several issues with HDV capturing…
can you at least capture anything (audio?) with the deck control disabled (set to non controllable
device)? I once had this – only way to overcome this: reinstall os-x & fcp (trashing prefs might work too – the machine I was working on deserved a fresh start…)
I guess you triple checked the menu by now. did you search the apple site for sth. like “hdv”?

hth,
henning

[Ric Christoferson]

Thought I would post my fix for the problem… I needed to keep my old system work intact because we do weekly tv spots and have to have a working system for that. G5 Duel – FCP 5.1.2 – Tiger 4.6
Sooo.. with all the stuff I had on my system hd.. I just could not get FCP to see the Sony HD Camera.

1) I took an empty external Firewire drive and loaded a clean version of Tiger on it… Then Booted the computer from the external… then ran through all the updates.. to 10.4.6… this HD was plugged into the front Firewire port (400) of the computer..

2) Took my FCP 5.1 cross platform CD’s That apple sent me and loaded that in the drive… I selected to only install FCP and Compressor… when though the install, entered all my numbers and then repaired desk permissions and all that… then check the system for anymore updates did several…. repaired disk permissions…. restarted the computer… booting from the external HD .. hooked up the camera (to the Firewire port in the back 400) — opened FC and went to easy setup 1080(60i) and everything worked… saw the camera and load and capture worked great…

Now I have this spare drive with a system and final cut only.. that does a great job of caturing HD footage over firewire…

🙂