Need help capturing my footage

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Dan_The_Man

Active member
Hi there,

I am trying to capture some footage from my Canon XH A1 to Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 but am having trouble. I have captured footage from this camera to my PC a number of times before but now when I try I just get a message at the top of the capture window saying "Can't activate recorder. Try resetting camera."

I have treid resetting and it still gets the same error message.

The footage is recorded in HDV 50i 16:9 and I am trying to capture it into an HDV 50i project (I see no option to select 16:9).

Any help would be much appreciated.

Dan
 
99% of the time this happens it's due to one of three things

1) The camera is not in the same playback mode as the capture setting. Make sure that the little display on the camera selection wheel reads HDV instead of DV. In theory the camera should automatically detect which playback mode it's in but sometimes it doesn't.
2) The firewire port on the camera is broken.
3) The firewire port on the computer is broken.

If it's 2 or 3 then you need to run tests to determine where the problem lies (i.e try using another computer to see if it's the camera or plugging in/buying another FW port on the comp).
 
It's none of these. I've got the same error, but everything works fine on my laptop. It's not that 99% of the time with this issue.
 
It is common for a firewire port to short out. (more of a mac issue but still happens on pc's) It's good practice to always make sure everything is off when plugging these things in.

also make sure your capture settings in the project are correct. ppro cs4 is odd and even though you can open many sequences your projects capture settings must be set correctly to either DV or HDV
 
You didn't mention that. I was assuming you have the same problem as the OP. I still say that your problem is within one of the 3 issues I mentioned above.

1) Make sure that Premiere is in a DV sequence and that the camera is in DV playback mode.
2) Check to make sure that your computer FW port is working by plugging in another FW device, preferably another camera.
3) Check to see that the camera's FW port is working by plugging the camera into another computer with a working FW device.

If worst comes to worst, reinstall Premiere.
 
Two different computers (both same model of Dell) do the exact same thing. I have a Vaio laptop that is running Windows 7 x64 with Premiere CS4 and I've hooked it up to both the Sony and JVC decks we use (both of which are throwing up the same error on the Dells) and both work perfectly fine on that.

All the settings are correct.

I suspect it has something to do with the codecs used in the capture process, but I've re-registered both qdv.dll and quartz.dll to no effect.

On the Dells, the same issue has occurred with Windows 7 x86 and Windows 7 x64. Never had a problem under XP. Firewire drives work just fine under this workstations as well. The VTR is listed as "Online" in the properties box under Premiere. Resetting the firewire driver to "Legacy" in the x86 Windows 7 fixed the problem at one time, but now it's cropping up again.
 
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