External Hard Drive Confliction w/ Deck?

P

prodigal

Active member
Hey guys. I am running DVD footage from my DVD player through my deck (miniDV camera) into FCP, looking to capture portions as a whole.

I just bought my new Lacie 250gb HD and as soon as I connect it to my G5 in any way, the feed from the miniDV camera just stops working. I have tried everything for the past 3 hours. Is there something obvious I am missing here? Thanks all.
 
That happens on my Dual 867 MDD G4. In FCP under View select Refresh A/V Devices. Your Deck should come back online.

:beer:
 
ian lucero said:
That happens on my Dual 867 MDD G4. In FCP under View select Refresh A/V Devices. Your Deck should come back online.

:beer:
Click to expand...

I have tried this, and unfortunately it does not come back online.

:(
 
Have you tried setting your capture scratch to an internal hard drive and capturing to that? You can at least then know if the problem is the capture workflow or the external firewire drive setup. I don't know the G5's mb's well enough, but my guess might be that you're running both firewire devices (camera and hard drive) off the same bus and so it can't handle the throughput you're asking of it. I don't know if that's right, but that would be my guess (especially if you are able to capture to an internal hard drive successfully).

cheers.
 
VaricamLife said:
Have you tried setting your capture scratch to an internal hard drive and capturing to that? You can at least then know if the problem is the capture workflow or the external firewire drive setup. I don't know the G5's mb's well enough, but my guess might be that you're running both firewire devices (camera and hard drive) off the same bus and so it can't handle the throughput you're asking of it. I don't know if that's right, but that would be my guess (especially if you are able to capture to an internal hard drive successfully).

cheers.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. I think you may be correct in your guess. I can capture to my internal HD successfuly, it is only when the external is setup that my deck simply doesnt respond. What may I do to remedy this situation? Thanks again.
 
That's unusual that you can't have a deck/camera plugged in and External HD plugged in at the same time to the machine (NOT daisy chained). Is you external drive being bus powered or does it have it's own power brick? Hopefully nothing is wrong with your deck/camera or your ext drive. Always make sure that those things are not turned on before plugging them into each other or your mac. There is a chance you could short out the connection or the device itself.

I've been able to daisy chain deck -> ext drive -> 2nd external drive -> to mac sucessfully with my dual 867 G4. It is only when I turn off one of those devices that it gets lost and all I have to do is 'refresh' the devices and 'ploop!' there back on.

Hope nothing is wrong with the mac.
 
ian lucero said:
That's unusual that you can't have a deck/camera plugged in and External HD plugged in at the same time to the machine (NOT daisy chained). Is you external drive being bus powered or does it have it's own power brick? Hopefully nothing is wrong with your deck/camera or your ext drive. Always make sure that those things are not turned on before plugging them into each other or your mac. There is a chance you could short out the connection or the device itself.

I've been able to daisy chain deck -> ext drive -> 2nd external drive -> to mac sucessfully with my dual 867 G4. It is only when I turn off one of those devices that it gets lost and all I have to do is 'refresh' the devices and 'ploop!' there back on.

Hope nothing is wrong with the mac.
Click to expand...

Well here is exactly what is happening:

1. I can capture perfectly to the internal (which is full) at any time with my miniDV deck.

2. Anytime the External HD is turned on it lags the miniDV for about 2-3 seconds until the miniDV deck stops sending any signal out completely.

3. If I were to turn the External HD off at this point, and reconnect the firewire from the deck, it begins working again perfectly. It seems that the External HD is entirely respsonsible for blocking the deck. It is brand new, I literally just ordered it from apple and took it out of the box...

Any ideas at this point? Thanks again for staying with me.
 
I don't think there's anything wrong with the camera or the external firewire drive. I believe both are perfectly fine. The problem is though, the front port and back port firewires for the G5, are they on the same bus on the motherboard? This I do not know, I don't know enough about the guts of the G5. If they are though, then there inlies a potential problem, by trying to input from camera to G5 (FCP) and then at the same time output from G5 (FCP) to external firewire, you're asking to much of it, at least that's how my thinking for that works (not an IT guy, so I might be way off the ball).

If they are on the same bus and that is the problem, then the solution would be to get a firewire card to insert into the motherboard and so you'll have a real seperate, secondary firewire connection then. Those card's aren't too expensive anymore (I'm pretty sure sub-$100) and I would think the G5 could handle taking the extra card.

Again there may be something else involved, I'm not sure. Hopefully one of the more hardware savvy folks will run over this thread and can give better insight into the problem. That' just my best guess on it though.

cheers.
 
No, the ports on a tower have seperate data busses. You should never daisy chain a camera/deck with a hard drive. I do what you're doing with great success. Be sure youre software and OS are all up to date.
 
BenB said:
No, the ports on a tower have seperate data busses. You should never daisy chain a camera/deck with a hard drive. I do what you're doing with great success. Be sure youre software and OS are all up to date.
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Why should you never daisy chain a deck to a ext drive?
 
Too much stress on the firewire bridge. Either it won't handle it well or you'll run the risk of burning it out.

cheers.
 
No, you can't burn it out hooking both, myth. What happens is that there will be too much data needed to go through Firewires limited bandwidth, and you'll get tons of dropped frames.

The Mac Portables have FW ports that all share one data bus. Towers have a seperate buss for 400 & 800. I'd make sure my hard drive was using a FW 800 port, and my deck was on a FW 400 port, on the tower.

The external hard drive should have a native FW800 port, use it connect to the Tower's dedicated FW800 port.
 
Yah I figured the data limits had something to do with it for sure. The burnout thing, yah I was always a little skeptical on because I always heard it second hand from people that 'apparently' burned out their bridges doing similar. Anyway...

But see then the tower 400's are what I expected, they are on the same bus. And I bet a lot of people still use 400 for the ext FW's, so if they're using the rear 400 port and the front 400 port, they basically are daisy chaining then, even if not directly hooking up the gear together. What do you do if you have an older ext that is FW 400 only then?

cheers.
 
I've used both front and back FW400 ports on towers just fine. If you bought a FW drive in the last couple of years, and our original post states he just bought one brand new, they all have FW800 ports. If you are stuck with an older drive, you can still plug a FW400 device into a FW800 port. FW ports are intelegent and can shift down their speed to do 400. It's just that a FW400 port will only do 400. You can plug an FW800 device into a FW400 port, it will simply shift itself into 400 mode.

One of the beauties of FW is that it is an intelegent transport medium. It is actually a network protocol more than a peripheal device protocol such as SCSI, SATA or Parllel (if you remember printers that old), so it plays well.

But never, ever, never, never, ever plug a FW device into a computer while it is turned on!!!!!! THAT actually has the potential to blow a physical port!
 
dunno if anybody else mentioned this, but hullo, Macrovision? Is this protected content? Might not work this way....
 
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