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HDV Capture (HDR-FX1) resolved with FW800
A client sent me miniDV tapes recorded in HDV with a Sony HDR-FX1.
I used the same camera to capture but experienced nothing but problems, FCP and my MacPro would routinely lose the Firewire connection (confirmed in System profiler).
I captured some footage using FW400 but the problem persisted, I swapped cables, ports, reset the NVRAM, prayed to the silicon gods, and in frustration (following Apple’s advice) wiped my drive and reinstalled the OS and FCP 6.
To my chagrin, the problem remained. This morning I bought a FW800 cable, connected the camera and behold, problem solved. Not a dropped frame, no loss of communication with the camera.
I have no idea what’s going on, even a new FW 400 cable failed. Perhaps it has something to do with the data rate and FW400 can’t keep up.
Just thought I’d pass this along to others who may be having the same problem.
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4 Replies
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I’m confused here…how did you connect a FW800 cable to the camera? The camera doesn’t actually have a FW800 port does it? Or did you just hook up your external drive via FW800?
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What type of drives are you capturing to?
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To clarify I bought a FW800 to 4 pin cable rather than the FW 400 4 pin to 6 pin variety.
The drives are raided SATA 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptors.
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Hi Brian,
I am having similar problems but no resolution with FW800. I recently bought an HDV deck at installed in my edit suite and it worked great for 6 weeks on firewire 400 capturing SD miniDV material. One day it just quit communicating. I tried it again on another system. No luck. I sent it to Sony and they said they could not replicate the trouble. I got it back in working order and then it stopped communication again. All on firewire 800.
Now here is the odd part, iMovie will recognize the deck but final cut pro will not. The same thing happens when I connect my Z1U to these machines. Final Cut Pro will recognize my old DSR11 DVcam deck and works just fine. Am I nuts? Any help anyone can offer would be great.
Thanks,
John
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