Firewire recognition issue

Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

Firewire recognition issue

Posted by Julie Kahn on February 10, 2010 at 10:35 pm

Hi all – first post here. I have hunted through years of old posts and can’t solve my problem. The Mac/FCP won’t recognize my camera through firewire. I’m on a MacPro dual 2.66Ghz with 2GB RAM. I have a camera (Sony PDX10) plugged firewire directly into the computer. There are no other firewire devices connected.

I have tried ALL manners of shutting down, camera on/off on boot up of Mac and boot up of FCP. I have tried both of the firewire ports on the Mac (front and back). I have used Easy Set up as well as trying other set ups. When I launch FCP it looks for devices and cannot find them. If I bypass that and start a new project and try to capture, I get the “Unable to initialize video deck. You may still log offline clips or use Capture Now.”

Now I must admit that when I boot my Avid Media Composer it ALSO does not see the firewire. I have captured before to my Avid, but never to my FCP. So not sure why the Firewire is not working now.

What could the Firewire issues be?

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Julie

Julie Kahn
Experienced Avid Editor, FCP novice
Watertown, MA

Stephen Smith replied 16 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
3 Replies

John Fishback
February 11, 2010 at 12:01 am

I’m not famiuliar with your camera, but it may be a camera setting. Is your camera in play or Firewire or iLink mode?

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.1, Motion 4.0.1, Comp 3.5.1, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.1)

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Julie Kahn
February 11, 2010 at 7:14 pm

Thanks for your help.

After testing other cables and different outputs on my camera, I think that the DV/Firewire output of my camera might be bad.

I tried to ‘feed’ it directly into a DVD recorder via the firewire out of the camera and no signal showed up. I used the AV output of the camera and it worked fine.

I have just borrowed a DSR-11 deck and I seem to have deck control. No video signal yet, but I’m getting closer.

FCP says “Preview disabeld” in the viewing window. I don’t know how to “enable” that.
When I play the tape and click Capture “now” I get the error: “Waiting for TC. Device must be in VTR mode when Device Control is enabled.”

So any help on that issue would be much appreciated. I will look through old posts for that now.

Thanks,
Julie

(I neglected to say earlier, FCP 6.06 running Tiger 10.4.11)

Julie Kahn
Experienced Avid Editor, FCP novice
Watertown, MA
Stephen Smith
February 11, 2010 at 9:53 pm

The first time I tried to capture from a consumer HDV camera I could not get FCP to see the camera. That is because the cameras default settings where to down convert the HDV to SD. I think I lot of HDV cameras do this so it will play on a TV at default. Anyway, I’ve never used your camera, but it looks like it does HD and SD. So I would check the manual and make sure you are not down converting the footage to SD inside the camera during playback. Make sure it is set to HD during playback. Best of luck and hope this helps.

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