[John Baughman]

Jeremy,
Thanks for your prompt response to my problem. I assume from your answer that you are saying that the architecture of the quad G5 is such that the FW ports get overwhelmed by too many simultaneous connections? Is this also a problem with the newer Mac Pros which I am thinking of purchasing?

Excuse my ignorance. But would a PCIe Firewire card allow me to connect a RAID set consisting of two striped drives in one enclosure mirrored to two identical striped drives in an identical enclosure? That is what I am ultimately trying to do. Or at the very least I would like to be able to daisy chain a couple of these striped drives and use one of them for capture.
Thanks in advance.
John

[John Baughman]

I’ve been reading posts here and elsewhere to try and understand the best work flow for HDV and FCP.

I’m lost. I’ve been using FCP with standard DV for 3 years. But the switch to HDV bewilders me.
I have just purchased a VIXIA HV30 camcorder. I’m having real problems learning how to capture video shot on this camera and how to best edit and export.

I have the HV30 set to “HDV” format rather than the other choices available. I have FCP set up as follows:
Sequence Preset= “HDV-1080i50”; Capture Preset= “HDV”; Device Control Preset= “HDV 1080i50 Firewire Basic”.

When I try to capture using the capture clip feature, FCP searches back and forth on the tape and then announces that it is “unable to locate timecode”. If I try to capture “now”, after running through the tape and clicking “escape”, I get the message, “An unknown capture error has occurred”.

I want to use the camcorder to capture high quality footage and transfer it to my computer with as little loss in quality as possible. I will then edit the footage and use it in two ways. I want to export it and use it in DVDSP to provide high quality DVDs. In the future I might want to consider HD media.
I also want to convert the footage to QT movies for streaming from my web site.

My set up: Quad G5 with 8 GB RAM; both internal bays contain 750 GB drives; multiple external drives including a 500 GB FW800 drive that I have set as the scratch disk.

I really need some spoon feeding here, I’m embarrassed to say. Could someone please walk me through the actual settings I need to make in FCP to accomplish my goals. I suspect that my major problem is that I have my capture set-up wrong.
Thank you very much.
John