video playback say (missing) apple firewire NTSC 720×480

[James Lingo]

Okay. A few minutes after posting here about this problem I had a sudden epiphany and smacked my skull. For those of you whose gear has been working fine and then it seemed to suddenly stop being recognized (and whose cams still show up in system profiler/firewire) I just checked and any changes to your actual camera’s settings can result in it appearing as a new camera requiring a different easy-set up configuration (hence the frustration of the [missing] tag).

I had just lent my cam to a friend and he changed the settings to record in HD. All I’ve been using for a year is NTSC so when I hooked the cam back up I didn’t even realize. I went through a few different presets before one finally let me rewind/ffw but with no image which let me know I was on the right track, and then two more later and I was golden.

Hope this helps…

[Ann Clark]

Here’s a variation on that theme:

I use a Sony HDV deck, and usually FCP recognizes it when I start FCP.

Today, after rolling in DV footage with this Sony deck, I noticed that FCP was not recognizing the Sony deck. After lots of trashing of preferences, restarting FCP, restarting the Mac, plugging and unplugging (amid lots of head-scratching), I discovered that the deck was convinced it was set to HDV 1080i. I used the deck’s menu to change from “Autoselect HDV/DV” to just “DV” and then FCP finally caught on and recognized the deck again.

The only puzzling thing is how I was able to roll in footage just moments before, only to have the deck change its mind about the input.

So, I think if a deck or camera goes unrecognized like this, the best approach is to check if the deck or camera is set correctly (in this case, to DV).

MacPro 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 14GB memory – OSX10.6.4 FCP7