Need help recording live to DSR-11, then into FCP

[David Bogie]

[jhwilson] “This appears to work fine, but when I go back and check my 1 hour tape, there is always some skipped frames in the tape. I then have to capture the whole tape again which takes another hour.
I am using a 1.8ghz G5 mac with 2gb RAM.
I am needing a proven solution from someone here. Is the 1.8 G5 just not fast enough to capture an hour at once. Does the stream coming into the DSR-11 need to have a timecode added to it.
Does the DSR-11 add timecode to the stream as it records and can that timecode be exported via firewire to the mac?”

The proven solution is to do this properly with two decks or maybe with a FW recorder but the jury is still out on those rascals.
Forget trying to capture one hour of live stuff directly to the computer. What you’re probably seeing is hits on the OS and normal drive routines that somehow affect write buffer. You can try to tweak your Mac system prefs to eliminate all background operations but this is still a bad idea simply because we know recording to a conventional hard drive is full of holes and risks over which you have no control whatsoever and you cannot see the problems until you are done which is the wrong time to be finding out it didn’t work.
We have seen only a few successful stories about recording live to a Macintosh. We have never seen a post about someone recording to tape and being upset about the results.
Recording to a tape machine has literally no risks.

If you simply MUST have a digital file that you do not have to ingest, you must move to a more viable and far more expensive solution like maybe an Xserve and some super-tolerant RAIDs. Far cheaper to just record to tape and capture.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Bryce Whiteside]

I know the jury might be still in session the firewire direct recorders, but I sounds like a more viable option.

Firewire harddrives like Focus– https://www.focusinfo.com/ –have only one function, record DV video without a lot background system processes going on. Even though the video is considered one stream it records it to manageable chunks on their harddrive.

Has anyone used one of these firewire direct recorders to record and hour or more of video live with no stopping? I’m glad this question came up.

Inquiring minds…
Bryce

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion

[Kevin Monahan]

Are you using a separate INTERNAL SATA Drive? Or an external FW drive?

Never trust FW drives for long captures. Apple doesn’t recommend them at all, you know. For sustained throughput, an internal drive is the way to go.

Most complaints about long captures and dropped frames are due to krappy, slow FW drives.

Kevin Monahan
Author – Motion Graphics and Effects in Final Cut Pro
fcpworld.com

[Jhwilson]

I am using SATA drives, no firewire. What I’m recording is a church service. We are capturing to a DSR-11, and we are coming out of the DSR-11 to capture live to the mac.

Let me boil my question down to this for all you experienced gurus