Help!

Steve Laramie

Steve Laramie

Veteran
I shot a very last minute green screen scene. I used a canon xl2 with 24p 23:32 pulldown and 16:9. Im using final cut pro 5.5 and im digitizing with the camera. When I plug the camera in to my mac to capture the footage I get a message saying that the preview is dissabled then when I hit play it says searching for time code. There are no timecode breaks im garenteed. My easy setup setting on fcp is DV-NTSC 24p (23.98) advanced pulldown. I heard about a firewire problem with canons but this is a 3 week old camera. Im wondering if I have the wrong setting on fcp.
Thanks
 
Just checking the obvious...you are in VTR mode right? The preview disabled and "waiting" for time code is a signal you get when you are in camera mode.
 
Have you rebooted everything? I'd turn off everything. Hook up everything. Then turn it all back on (computer included). Make sure there's no ghosts kicking around buggerinig it up.

cheers.
 
I know on the G5s (not sure about macpro) it only likes to see one FW400 plugged in at a time. so if you have like a FW drive and the camera hooked up at the same time it might not see the camera. something about there only being one FW bus for the two ports.

if you don't have two things plugged in, that comment is irrelevant.
 
thanks jcskeeter I have a 500gb hardrive in my fw port along with the camera. This could be it but the problem is that harddrive is my capture scratch is there a way to buy a hub to get more power? thanks
 
not that I know of. best thing would be to hook the FW drive up via FW800 if it has it (I'm pretty sure that has it's own bus, I think I have done that before?.... yeah I have) then you can run both at the same time. Or else just set up a capture folder and tell FCP to put your captured media there, on the system drive. then just do a transfer and reconnect media when it's on the FW drive.

This method may not be the best if you have a lot of footage to capture. if that is the case it might be time to think about a different drive with eSATA with a eSATA card or something like that. Or it could be a completely different problem.

I wanna say for some reason I remember hearing something about canons and capturing problems via FW? Not sure though? Might be worth doing a quick search on here or google it.
 
Unplug your hard drive. Plug in your camera and try capturing a clip straight to your internal hard drive (temporarily change the capture scratch). This can at least let you know if its simply the FW 400 port issue.

If you have it, you could try using FW 800 of your hard drive. But we've run into hiccups once in a while that with the FW 800 plugged in, we get no response at all out of the FW 400. But it doesn't always happen, so no clue what the issue is when it does.

If that's not even an option, you could always get another firewire card. If you haven't used up all of your slots in your machine, you can install a dedicated firewire card. It will then run off a separate bus from the mainboard one already there.

cheers.
 
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