External Fire Wire Drive and Final Cut 3

[dsmoss]

I'm editing with my iMac G4 in Final Cut 3 and have recently bought an external fire wire drive for capturing footage. I've set this external drive as my capture scratch and ever looks to be fine.

However, when I go to batch capture some logged footage it drops frames within two seconds everytime. At first I thought it was the deck that I was using so I got another. Same thing happens. I then tried capturing to my iMac harddrive and it works fine.

Can anyone shed some light as to why I get dropped frames while using the external fire wire?

The drive is acomdata's E5 hard drive with 160GB, 7200 RPM with speed of 480 Mbps.

[LethalWolfe]

What drive did you get? Some combinations of FW devices don't place nice together.

Worst case digitize to your main drive then move everything over to your FW drive.


Lethal

[CanadaRAM]

The drive is acomdata's E5 hard drive with 160GB, 7200 RPM with speed of 480 Mbps.
OK, the 480 Mbs is a USB 2.0 theoretical measurement. I assume though you got one of those Acomdata units with both USB and FW

When you capture IN with Firewire and save OUT with Firewire at the same time, you are doubling the load on the Firewire controller. Like LW says - capture to your internal drive first -- THEN move the files to the FW drive.

IIRC there were some issues with the Acomdata's stability on Macs, but you'd have to go digging for the info.

[dsmoss]

Thanks guys. I dug a little deeper and it seems like that is the solution.

All Best.............