Live Capture 2.2

[Rolf Howarth]

I was on vacation… still catching up with emails!

One possibility, do you have Final Cut running at the same time? If so, that might be keeping the FireWire device open, preventing other apps from using it.

Also, bear in mind that Live Capture Plus only works with DV, not HDV, as the formats are very different and LCPlus was designed specifically to take advantage of the DV format (ie. self-contained frames with no interframe compression). If you need to use LCPlus on HDV tapes set your deck to downconvert HDV->DV on playback. All the metadata and scene breaks are preserved, and it’s fine for cataloguing tapes while building low-res proxies, though you will need to recapture relevant clips in FCP to edit at full res.

Finally, if you still can’t power up, make sure you connect your deck straight to the computer (not via a FireWire hub), disconnect any other devices such as FireWire hard drives, and try again after a fresh reboot without launching any other apps first. If you still have problems, try a different FireWire cable and do some tests with a plain DV tape, or try another machine.

[Andy Johnson-laird]

A well earned vacation, I’d say, Rolf.

I see the problem now: I was trying to ingest HDV format. I didn’t realize that LCP would only handle DV — as you say the HDV/GOP compression is substantially different from the independent frames of HD.

The meta problem I was trying to solve was to find a way of ingesting a tape that contains both timecode and date/time of recording and be able to extract that information. iMovie can name HDV clips according to date/time, but discards timecode. FCP does the inverse — it preserves the time code but discards the date/time of recording.

Sigh. I was trying to do this because I use an FS-CV DTE hard disk recorder from Focus Enhancements that normally names the clips based on the date/time when you start recording. But one of the three units I was using went rogue and was drifting like mad and was emitting date/time filenames back in 2003. Fortunately I was also recording to miniDV, but then the problem was how to get the date/time when the clips were recorded back into the filename.

Anyway, I solved the problem using some bash/gawk scripts I wrote on the Mac and a little command line interface program called aditc that, for a given .mov file, extracts the timecode and spits it out to stdout. I don’t know who wrote aditc but I owe them several beers.

(Oh…and the deck/cameras were connected directly to the Macs — the problem is/was the HDV issue.)

Regards
Andy

Forensic Software/Internet/Image Analyst
Portland, Oregon

[Rolf Howarth]

If you downconvert HDV->DV you will get both the timecode and date-time information. (CatDV can also read this information from a .mts HDV stream by the way, though this isn’t generally too useful because you can’t directly play that stream using QuickTime).