[Jerryhwilson]

Frank,

I tried this exact thing for a couple of hours before our show this week. My deck was already on EE and I cannot capture without putting the FCP Log and Capture window into Non-controllable device mode. If I leave it on Firewire NTSC, begin my capturing on the DSR11, and press capture now in the window, it will record 16 frames, every time, and then stop the deck and state that the end of the tape has been reached.

I tried every option I could find and every combination I can think of to make this work and can’t get any kind of capture WITH time code coming from a RECORDING DSR11 deck.

How am I differing from what you have tried?

[Jerryhwilson]

Thanks for the help Tom. I could have SWORN that I have tried this, but I’m going backed, armed with your information, and trying again. We are going into a Sony DSR-11, and I’ve tried my DSR-20 as well, but couldn’t get the Firestore to turn on in any circumstance. I know that I tried SOME manual mode and couldn’t get it to start recording for any reason. The firestore just said it was waiting for timecode.

I will repost when my experiments are done. Thanks again.

[Jerryhwilson]

Sorry, I missed the exact details of your post until I re-read it. If you captured to the firestore without rolling tape from your camera, you did exactly what we’re trying to do. I have the exact same Firestore, so I’m going to try that as well on my lunch break today.

Thanks again.

[Jerryhwilson]

Thanks so much for the input here. I am assuming that in your test with your camera that you ran it through that mixer rather than just hooking the Firestore to the camera? (Mine does fine in that instance as well.)

I wish I knew more about your deck. I won’t have a chance to be around our equipment until Saturday, but I will kick the tires hard at that time using your suggestions. I have also noticed that Apple has released a firmware update for our very computer citing “video intensive” problems. I don’t know if that is an issue, but I’m going to do the firmware upgrade.

Thanks so much for your help. I will be back in touch via this board.

[Jerryhwilson]

Will this work for me considering there is no timecode to pass through the deck? The deck is creating the timecode and we have found any setting that would pass that “on-the-fly” timecode through to the mac so we could use the firewire NTSC setting.

[Jerryhwilson]

I’d love to hear your exact workflow. We cannot get a Firestore to even let us manually start it without a timecode present. It just sits there. If you can record live to a Sony Deck and simultaneously pass a signal to the firestore that records I would love to hear about it.

Tell me more.

[Jerryhwilson]

I am using 4 Sony vx2100 cameras and bringing in an s-video signal to a videonics mixer (analog) and coming out from there with an S-video signal to a DSR-11. I’m coming out of the DSR-11 via Firewire to a G5, 1.7 into FCP 5. We’re using 10.4.5 (although the upgrade to this was accidental) and latest version of quicktime.

Specifically, we capture to tape fine with the DSR-11. We capture fine FROM the DSR-11 to the G5 as long as we use Firewire NTSC and capture from the recorded tape. It is using the pass-thru that gives us problems. When we switch to non-controllable device we have fits. The program ends up with time lapses and jumps throughout its duration.

As for the Firestore, we cannot get it to capture in ANY mode from the DSR-11 firewire signal when the Sony Deck is recording live. We are guessing that the Sony deck does is creating time code from the analog signal and laying it to tape but is not passing that through the firewire signal to the mac. We cannot capture now and see no timecode readings using Firewire NTSC.

When this “live” 75 minute program ends, we have three hours to have it on the air on DVD. You can see why we need to not spend 75 minutes of it capturing something that could have been captured live in the first place.

[Jerryhwilson]

Have you used this device in a similar circumstance, or can you vouch for its applicability in our situation?

[Jerryhwilson]

We have tried to do that, but can’t get the Firestore to start up because it, too, is waiting on timecode. It just sits there in “ready” mode.

We have it capturing to a separate drive on the Mac, and empty, non-journaled drive, and have plenty of hard drive space.

After a year of experiments with multiple cameras and decks, this appears to be a FCP deficiency, I’m just needing to know if anyone has overcome it somehow that we might now have thought of.

Thanks for trying.