Martyn Park
New member
Thought I'd post this for what it's worth.
I just got my camera yesterday and I took it round to a mates place for the official unveiling (and a beer). After staring at the bulbous blob for a couple of minutes, and due to the fact that I haven't got any p2 cards as yet, he suggested plugging it directly into his old 2002 G4 Dual 1ghz processor with 512meg ram and a 64meg graphics card with a 7200rpm 80gig internal ATA drive.
After following the (recipe) that I got off the board here posted by Andy Starbuck...
Recipe:
1) With the camera OFF, connect the firewire between the camera and the Mac.
2) Turn on the camera and make sure its in the mode you want and has the black balance and white balance set and is ready to go.
3) Launch FCP.
4) Run Easy Setup for a mode that matches the HVX mode. Easy Setup will cause FCP to search for the camera that is firewire attached and "speaking that language". If it can't communicate with the camera because the modes are incompatible, it will report that the camera was not found. Run a different Easy Setup until it finds the camera. I think for 1080i I had to copy and edit a profile to create my own Easy Setup.
5) Once FCP recognizes the camera, start Capture in FCP.
6) Go to the control tab and set camera controls to "none" instead of Firewire. Otherwise when you go to capture, FCP will wait to be told by the camera that it is ready to "play" the stream -- and it never sends that signal.
7) Now start capturing manually in the FCP capture utility. You should see the image from the HVX in the preview monitor window for capture.
...we began to capture 1080 25p with audio into FCP 5.04 until his hard drive almost filled up, about 18min, without dropping a frame or presenting a glitch of any kind. We repeated this a couple of times to see if it was just a fluke, but flawless everytime. Also the clips played back in the timeline without any problems after capture, and out of the cinema desktop the same.
As an outsider looking in when I was trying to decide which camera to purchase for my next project, I was led to believe (by whom I don't know) that to capture 1080 you would at least need a G5 or similar. Obviously not.
It makes me think that the entry model macbook may be able to capture live 1080 without any problems, anyone tried it or is already doing it? I wonder how slow the setup would have to be before it would start to drop frames?
I just got my camera yesterday and I took it round to a mates place for the official unveiling (and a beer). After staring at the bulbous blob for a couple of minutes, and due to the fact that I haven't got any p2 cards as yet, he suggested plugging it directly into his old 2002 G4 Dual 1ghz processor with 512meg ram and a 64meg graphics card with a 7200rpm 80gig internal ATA drive.
After following the (recipe) that I got off the board here posted by Andy Starbuck...
Recipe:
1) With the camera OFF, connect the firewire between the camera and the Mac.
2) Turn on the camera and make sure its in the mode you want and has the black balance and white balance set and is ready to go.
3) Launch FCP.
4) Run Easy Setup for a mode that matches the HVX mode. Easy Setup will cause FCP to search for the camera that is firewire attached and "speaking that language". If it can't communicate with the camera because the modes are incompatible, it will report that the camera was not found. Run a different Easy Setup until it finds the camera. I think for 1080i I had to copy and edit a profile to create my own Easy Setup.
5) Once FCP recognizes the camera, start Capture in FCP.
6) Go to the control tab and set camera controls to "none" instead of Firewire. Otherwise when you go to capture, FCP will wait to be told by the camera that it is ready to "play" the stream -- and it never sends that signal.
7) Now start capturing manually in the FCP capture utility. You should see the image from the HVX in the preview monitor window for capture.
...we began to capture 1080 25p with audio into FCP 5.04 until his hard drive almost filled up, about 18min, without dropping a frame or presenting a glitch of any kind. We repeated this a couple of times to see if it was just a fluke, but flawless everytime. Also the clips played back in the timeline without any problems after capture, and out of the cinema desktop the same.
As an outsider looking in when I was trying to decide which camera to purchase for my next project, I was led to believe (by whom I don't know) that to capture 1080 you would at least need a G5 or similar. Obviously not.
It makes me think that the entry model macbook may be able to capture live 1080 without any problems, anyone tried it or is already doing it? I wonder how slow the setup would have to be before it would start to drop frames?