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No Preview Available
The system is a Apple power PC Quad core 2.8GHz 8Gig of ram with FCP 6.0.5 and a Multibridge Pro running drives 6.8.7 (at the time).
We were ingesting some Mini DV footage earlier today and everything was working fine. We went in and changed the device control from NTSC Firewire to BlackMagic NTSC 29.97 so we could control our Beta deck. All the footage come in Component via Component sub router or SDI via out main router, depending on what it is we are doing and we will change the setting in the control panel accordingly.
Well after we changed the device control. Final Cut would lock up when we opened the Log and Capture window.
I removed and re-installed the 6.7.8 driver and that fixed the locking up problem, but I then had no audio or video coming into the system Log and capture said Preview Unavailable or something like that.
I went to you web site and saw there were 7.1 driver downloaded and installed them and the system locked up on Log and capture again.
I removed the hard drive and put in a cloned drive that had earlier drivers (6.7.3 I think) and I was able to open Log and Capture, but No Preview Available with both SDI input or Component Input.
Any Ideas.
Steve Cohen
Senior Editor
O2 Media Inc. -
4 Replies
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Hi Steve,
I’m guessing a little here but this is what I think is happening. You can find some information in the Apple document Final Cut Pro 6 Working with High Definition and Broadcast Formats. On page 21, it mentions the following.
Important: If your computer has a PCI graphics card installed and you are logging or capturing HDV footage, Final Cut Pro does not preview video or audio in the Log and Capture window. You can still log and capture, but you need to use your HDV camcorder display to preview video.
We also have a somewhat dated support note on our web site named HDV capture preview missing in Final Cut Pro HD 5.0. The key point in the article is that this problem can be resolved by switching of the extended desktop provided by a Multibridge or DeckLink. To do so, open your System Preferences and click on DeckLink or Blackmagic (depending on your driver version) and configure the following preference. When not playing video, send Black to all the video outputs. Restart the Mac and I think this will fix your problem.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Luke;
The problem was capturing SD footage on the Component or SDI inputs.
Capturing Mini DV thru Firewire always worked fine.[Luke Maslen] “The key point in the article is that this problem can be resolved by switching of the extended desktop provided by a Multibridge or DeckLink. To do so, open your System Preferences and click on DeckLink or Blackmagic (depending on your driver version) and configure the following preference. When not playing video, send Black to all the video outputs. Restart the Mac and I think this will fix your problem.”
Switching the extended desktop to black seemed to work.
Just out of curiosity I switched it back to extended desktop, re-booted the system and it still worked, but I changed it back to black just to be safe since we have no need for that option on that system.Thanks
Steve Cohen
Senior Editor
O2 Media Inc. -
Hi Steve,
I’m very happy to read that you have your preview back. I’m a little confused about why changing the extended desktop to black helped given that your preview continued to work when you re-enabled the extended desktop. I do know that video output via an uncompressed capture card will automatically be disabled if you switch to using FireWire capture. If you then switch back to your uncompressed capture card, you have to manually re-enable external video in Final Cut Pro. Between this trick and the one that disables HDV preview with a PCI capture card, there are clearly at least two factors which can affect affect video with your Multibridge. I think you would need to perform a number of trial and error tests to work out exactly what scenario switches off your preview but I’m glad you’ve managed to re-enable it by simply setting the extended desktop to black. If the problem recurs even though you have set the extended desktop to black, make an immediate note of what changes were made immediately prior to losing preview, especially if you were switching between using FireWire capture and your Multibridge. The note will be helpful in troubleshooting the problem if it occurs.
Regards,
Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design -
Steve, Luke,
I also have had a “preview disabled” problem when trying to capture BM PAL 8-bit uncompressed through SDI – (the footage was 16:9 digibeta fed from a Sony J30).
With the “Preview Disabled” I hit the capture “now” and an error message came up saying “codec error, unsupported frame size”. I switched to 10 bit uncompressed and, still with no preview, I hit capture and suddenly it started capturing the footage. So I stopped capture returned to 8-bit and the same error message came up. I am not doing anything that I haven’t had working before.
So I googled the problem and this post came up. So following the instructions I reset the BM preferences to say “send Black” (as instructed), restarted the mac and it started working.
I have presently not switched the preferences back, restarted and tried again but will do after my capture is complete.
Have you found out what this problem is?
Kind regards
Jez
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