capturing live video from an hvx200 through FCP to an external HD

[Russell Lasson]

You should be able to do so by connecting the firewire from the camera to the computer and then using log and capture in FCP to digitize.

You’ll need to get you’re settings right though. What format are you shooting?

-Russ

[Rick Morris]

I am shooting 720/24p or pn. I am using FC 5 studio suite on a somewhat sooped up G4 powermac and G4 powerbook. I use Lacie fire wire drives. I also shoot in SD but seldom anymore. then 480/24p. As it is I have mixed success capturing and fairly good results importing though I hate wasting storage on entire clips. RM

[Russell Lasson]

If you’re shooting in 720P then you need a sustained transfer rate of about 15MB/sec. I know of a feature length documentary that recorded interviews this way.

How full is your drive? Is it a dual drive FW800 drive or just a single?

It wouldn’t hurt to buy a FW800 PCI card though.

-Russ

[Rick Morris]

I have a Lacie, 300 gig drive allocated for this with about 270 gigs available. It is a combo drive with both 800 and 400 ports and I connect to my computer with Fire wire.. The laptop has a PCI port but not the tower. I will be using the laptop in the field for this with the HD connected to external power. I also have 2,16 gig cards for the camera but I will then have to import during the interviews and that is what I am trying to avoid….. I am just not sure how to set it all up to make this happen. RM

[Dan Riley]

Are you saying you want to capture to hard drive LIVE?
If so there are a number of ways to do it.

1- the simple way, connect your firewire cable from your camera
to the laptop, open FCP, do the easy setup for whatever flavor or
dvcprohd you are doing, change the control to capture as uncontrollable device.
Then you hit capture now.
You will not have camera timecode this way. Every time you
start and stop the recording on the laptop the timecode will
start over but you will have a new clip each time so it’s not too bad.
You would record to your internal disk in this situation
which isn’t the best idea. Or you could purchase a express card
with a firewire port (400 or 800) to connect your external hard drive.
Do not daisy chain your camera and your hard drive together…ever.
And the two ports on your laptop go to the same buss in the computer
so it’s the same as daisy chaining.

2- Purchase (or demo) Scopebox.
https://scopebox.com/index.html
This program allows you to monitor and capture from the HVX200
with camera timecode. It’s a great little program.
You will still need an express card to capture to your external
hard drive, but scopebox will allow you to get timecode and
have a waveform monitor.

Dan