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HVX200 won’t talk to devices, computers
I bought an HVX200 last week. Tested it. Shot a few things. Put a few things in FCP. Worked great!
Then I shot something real yesterday. Tried to offload to a hard drive, using 1394 host mod. It didn’t work — it won’t recognize any of the three drives I tested (and which had worked fine before). It won’t work in 1394 device mode, either. So I’m stuck with two full 8GB P2 cards and no way to get at the footage.
What to do? I’ve read a month of posts — lots of suggestions to just keep trying, it seems. Anything else?
I’ve tried two different firewire cables. Three different external hard drives (two Seagate, one Fantom). When in 1394 host mode, all menu options are grayed out except ‘set up’. When in 1394 device mode, nothing, except twice it tried to mount the P2 cards and then showed an error message saying that a device had been improperly disconnected.
I’m running a G5 Quad with 2.5 GB RAM and 10.4.4 and FCP 5.04 — although all of my problem seems to be with the stock HVX200 and P2 cards, I think…
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11 Replies
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Have you put it in the Firewire connect mode, and mounted it that way?
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Careful with the host mode: it’ll want to format the drive you attached into a PC format first and later make partitions (up to sixteen) for each card to copy.
In device mode you should see it just like any harddisk on your Mac. Do you get a “connect” screen? Do you know you have to press the button on the back once to get from camera to VCR mode and then hold it a second time until it’s in PC mode ?
Hope this helps,
Uli
Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.
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Yes, the functionality is so simple — when it was fresh out of the box, I tested the camera several times in both ‘host’ and ‘device’ mode. It worked beautifully every time — no problems. The menuing — the mode switching — everything seemed clear and simple.
Thus it was difficult to fathom why it would suddenly stop working. I am hoping there is some toggle somewhere — some sub-sub-menu that I have accidentally nudged.
Probably, it worked earlier because I was simply testing it with no skin in the game. Once I actually shot something valuable, it was natural for it to stop working…
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Yes indeed, although perhaps I am calling this ‘device’ mode — i.e., connecting the camera to a G5 via the 1394 port. This worked fine several times and on two different computers.
Interestingly, now that it is not working as a 1394 device, it causes weird mounts/dismounts in other devices and occasional hard crashes on the G5. That is, if I try to connect in device mode, the FireWire 800 devices connected to the computer start to blink rapidly, nothing at all happens on the FireWire 400 bus, and eventually the 800 devices dismount. Sometimes they remount automatically. Other times they don’t.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the P2 software that I ‘installed’ on the G5? (The software disk that is packaged with the HVX200.) I put installed in quotes because after I ‘installed’ the software I could never find evidence of installation. No application. No fresh options in Disk Utility. Odd.
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And just to be clear: yes, I formatted several hard drives from the camera while it was in ‘host’ mode. I didn’t fret about it, although I wondered how Panasonic was getting around FAT32’s inability to handle files larger than 4GB. I mean, what if you run a continuous take on a P2 card and the file is almost 8GB?
I want to mention this: in my tests, everything was dandy on all takes — five minute takes, five second takes, whatever. And there was plenty of room left on one card.
At the moment, I shot out both cards — filled ’em up — which was gratifying for me. As soon as I saw the cards go full, I switched off the camera, toggled over to tape mode, powered up, and was shooting in DVCPRO50 mode immediately. Maybe 20 seconds of downtime. That was nice!
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Is the camera still working live over FireWire? I’ve seen FW-ports fried…
Regards,
Uli
Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.
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And on the camera? If you can’t even get it to became a host and see disks, it might be fried.
Sorry if I’m right…
Uli
Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.
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I would certainly suspect the camera’s firewire port of having been blown up. If you hot-swap (unplug/plug while the power is on) to a mac (or other six-pin firewire port) you run the risk of blowing up your firewire port.
Put it in 1394 Device mode, go to PC mode, and see if it shows up on your mac’s desktop. If it does, you can use the camera as a card reader to get at the contents of your cards.
Also, consider that if you’re trying to use bus power to power the firewire drives, that won’t work when connected to the camera; the camera cannot supply firewire bus power.
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It’s certainly possible that the camera’s firewire port is now malfunctioning. The fact that I was able to use the camera in both device and host mode when it was fresh from the box, and now I can’t use it in either mode, seems to indicate that *something* is wrong now. That said, I can’t remember doing anything out of sequence or inadvertantly pulling power. Given the insecure nature of the firewire connection, I would hope that an accidentally detached firewire cable wouldn’t disable the camera permanently. That would suck.
There is a signal coming from the firewire port — when I plug it into a computer (using ‘device’ mode), the computer will react as if a device has been attached, but nothing will mount on the desktop. I have tried four different late-model G5 computers, but none of them will mount the camera.
Lacking a fix, I’m going to box up this camera and send it back to Panasonic. What a drag.
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