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FCP not recognizing Z1U
I’ve looked through similar problems people have had but could not find the final answer, the one I didn’t do yet.
I am trying to capture into FCP 6.06 from a Sony Z1U. I have a PAL tape, shot on HDV in PAL. I cannot for the life of me get FCP to recognize the camera. I’ve tried replacing the cable, I’ve tested the firewire port, it’s fine, I changed from one firewire port to another.
I have i-link at off. The little HDV light next to the 4-pin connection on the camera is on. A/V-DV OUT is set to off. VCR HDV/DV is set to HDV.
I’ve tried to down convert to DV and go in SD but that’s not working either. Any ideas, anyone??? The Easy Setup in FCP is set to HDV, 1080i50 firewire (not “firewire basic” although I tired that as well.
Any ideas, before I throw the camera off a bridge? 🙂
Thank you!
David“We’ll fix it in post”
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8 Replies
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Restart computer, if you haven’t, and make sure the camera is on and plugged in BEFORE you start up FCP.
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W/the camera connected and powered on go the Apple menu (upper left hand corner of screen), select About This Mac, select More Info, and under the Hardware heading select FireWire. You should see your camera listed there. If it’s not listed then the Mac is not seeing your camera. If the Mac is not seeing your camera either the FW port on the Mac is bad, the FW port on the camera is bad or the FW cable is bad.
If the Mac is seeing your camera start playing back an HDV tape and then open up FCP. I think the HDV devices, since they can be either HDV or DV, sometimes aren’t sending out a ‘clear signal’ to FCP about what format is in the device but if you are playing a tape back then it seems to solve that issue (at least in my experience).
-Andrew
3.2GHz 8-core, FCP 6.0.4, 10.5.5
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (6.8.1) -
There’s a known issue with the Z1U’s firewire port getting fried if you plug it in while the computer is on. Did you confirm that the camera’s firewire port is still good, or only the mac?
Sounds like that’s what happened….
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Thanks everyone,
Yeah that might be what happened. What a crazy problem that is! I have no idea if it happened here or before it got to me. I was careful to turn stuff off when I hooked it up – possibly except for the first time, I’m not 100% sure though. The Mac’s firewire port is fine, but I hooked up the camera to two Mac laptops and in both cases it wouldn’t recognize it.
BUT – and this is strange – if I have an external hard drive connected to my computer, and it’s on (and I see it on the desktop) – it’s connected through the fw800 port – if I now connect the Z1U, while it’s off, and then turn it on (either through the external hard drive or just into the tower’s fw400 port), then the external hard-drive is suddenly thrown off the desktop and it says I removed it improperly. Which leads me to think that the computer must at least be AWARE that the camera – or at least that something – is being connected to it.
Make the diagnosis even weirder, right?
“We’ll fix it in post”
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I manage a college lab setting with one lab of 17 new (6 month old) Mac Intel towers. We have only intermittent recognition of our HDV VCR decks. Each tower has four fw800 ports, all of which are on a single internal hub. I can find very little addressing this issue, & would think more people would have noticed this, since it is happening on multiples of machines.
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Coming in late on this thread….did this get sorted? If so how?
I am experiencing exactly the same situation as David and it’s driving me crazy!!!! Including the external HD being dumped when Z1U is connected in a daisy chain? Yet not being recognized via the ‘About this mac’ route when plugging in directly to my MacBook Pro.
Have read numerous links and discussions on this subject – including the popular iLink setting but no one seems to have come up with an answer or solution.
It’s a hired camera I’m using, so can’t comment on it’s connectivity history.
Any help greatly appreciated.
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We resolved this issue at my job. I researched FW to the point of reading engineers’ blueprints & white papers on FW standards, & no one describes this:
Most FW cables out there don’t seem to work with Macs.
There are some FW cables that have little tiny holes in the ends, where the wires can be seen (otherwise you just see the wires on the sides of the central part in the interior of the plug. Those are the only cables we can get to reliably work with our 50 PowerMacs used for video editing. You can’t specify those cables, & no one addresses this difference. You have to look at a good image when you order or examine the cable ends.
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I’m having the same problem. I checked the about this about/mac/firewire and the camera “sees” it.
If I convert the output signal from HDV to DV, I can capture the video as either squeezed or edge crop with the change the capture/input set to DV NTSC 48 kHz
When I am not converting the signal from HDV to DV, it does not matter what I change the capture/input to be, the camera is not recognized by the software, even though the camera is still is shown as being recognized in about/mac/firewire.
Could it be that the issue is not hardware related but software related?
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