[Mark Fusco]

I know this is over two years old, but I’d like to offer my experience on this. I had the same issue recently. What I did was go to User Preferences under the General tab and where it says “Abort capture on dropped frames” make sure that is UNCHECKED. I’ve done a video for a client for the past 6 years once a year and this was the first year I didn’t use my iBook G4 (800Mhz). With that system I had unchecked that box so long ago that I forgot about doing it on my current system – 20″ iMac (2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo).

Once that happened, it was just like old times. I never had and issues with my iBook and capturing from a miniDV camera and using the internal drive. The only thing I did make sure of was limiting as many apps as possible during import. But my iBook was so slow, that that was SOP whenever I used FCE even for editing. Other than that your system should be able to handle the import.

Now, with that setting unchecked is there a potential to have problems? Yes. But normally everything imported just fine. What you will see happen is that the tape will stop on the camcorder and a message saying “Locating timecode break.” Depending on the speed of your system, this could take for what seems like a minute or more to just a few seconds. Many times the camcorder will toggle back and forth until FCE picks up where it left off. At that point you’ll get a message saying “Capturing Clip cueing source material” just like when you started.

No matter what, when you are doing some serious stuff with FCE the less stress on your system, the better, but if you have the Mail.app open and say Safari open to type responses to forum posts, the capture should go well with most of the current systems. Even my iBook could at least handle that.

This post typed while actually importing said client’s tape after just going through the dropped frames headache 😉