-
Capturing to a drive via USB
Hi,
I usually always capture footage via firewire from the camera to my machine to a drive that is also connected via firewire. I have been doing this for years without an issue.
I am doing someone a favour and capturing footage to his drive which is connected to my machine via USB. Now for some reason it only captures small chunks into separate clip of about 2 – 6 minutes and every now and again it stops capture and says “out of disk space” when there are 450gigs available on the drive! I have checked that my scratch disks are set in the correct place. Is this normal? Is it because I am using a USB cable to connect the drive to my machine? Or perhaps the tapes are dodgy.
Help!
-
2 Replies
-
Capturing via USB is almost impossible due to the data structure of the bus, ti doesn’t do coherent streams of data, it does bursts that cannot be properly written as media files.
You’re far better off copying the files to your hard drive and then importing them.bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
-
Hi Lee-Anne,
Is there a chance that the drive isn’t formatted for Mac? Open Disk Utility and check how the drive has been initialized. If it is formatted for mac you may want to check if there is the 2 gb file limitation is checked in the fcp preferences and also make sure the permissions of the capture drive are kosher. While USB isn’t recommended I do capture with it. I have a bunch of drives that are esata/usb2 and capture on machines that don’t have an an esata port to edit on machines that do. While the throughput of the usb is 20-30 MB/sec (compared to 60-70 MB/sec for esata) its still more than adequate to capture dv or hdv.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up