New to FCP — Setup Question

[Russell Lasson]

Couple of options.

First to clarify, there is one firewire400 port on the front and one on the back. So you could use those two.

Or you could loop the deck through the hard drive if the firewire hard drive has two ports.

You could use a firewire800 (9-pin) to firewire400 (6-pin) cable to connect to the deck or drive.

Or you could use a firewire800 drive instead.

There are more options too, but that should suffice for now.

-Russ

Russell Lasson
Kaleidoscope Pictures
Provo, UT

[Shirlyn Wong]

Hi,

I can’t tell you the answer however my friend has similar problem. The FW400 and 800 share the same bus, therefore you cannot use them at the same time. Now it would make sense to connect your DVcam to the FW400 and hard drive to the 800. However you wont be able to Print to Video. Of course there is the USB port but that is too slow to run RT for tape output. The Mac people told her to get a SATA card so she can connect her hard drive that way however that not becomes costly.

Is this some kind of stupid mistake Apple made when designing the MacBook Pro? Given the info I know seems like it….

My suggestion to her if she wanted to avoid the SATA card is to export the final sequence with a high compression, like Animation, on to the system HD. Then import back into FCP and then out to tape. Of course in theory there would be some minute down compression but given DV is already compressed it might not matter… Thats my thought…. however don’t know if I’m right…

[Russell Lasson]

After reading Shirlyn’s comments, I’ve realized that I misunderstood which computer you were talking about Doug.

You said, “a MAC PRO portable and FCP Studio 2.” And I missed the word portable, meaning that you purchased a MacBook Pro, instead of a Mac Pro.

So you can either:

-Loop the deck through the hard drive
-Use a 800 to 400 cable to connect to the other port
-Buy a Firewire or SATA Expresscard to expand the ports on your laptop.

-Russ

Russell Lasson
Kaleidoscope Pictures
Provo, UT