Trouble with this FCE setup...

Well I have a little video project to do over the next couple months or so. I can get around OK in iMovie HD06 and honestly could probably do most of this project in it but I figured it was my big chance to learn FCE. This will probably be about 25 minutes, mostly shot on the Canon below:


iMac 24" 2.8 ghz (early 2008 model)
Canon ZR800 (consumer grade MiniDV camera)
FW800 / 400 / USB / eSATA drive enclosure
Final Cut Express 4

Here's the big problem:

Whenever I plug my camera into the FW, the drive plugged into the FW800 disappears from finder. It immediately re-appears when I unplug my camera. I've also read that any time you plug in a FW400 device any FW800 devices slow down too.

I bought this drive to use as a scratch disk, but If I can't have my camera and external drive at the same time, that's not going to work.

I also have a MBP (pre-unibody)

I was planning to use my camera to run my external monitor as well. Is the camera the problem or is there another way around this? Should I run my external drive in USB (which everyone says not to do) when capturing or just do everything on the internal drive (which everyone says not to do)

-DH said:

Due to Canon's rather lax adherence to the Firewire standard

Click to expand...

Ah, that's what I was afriad of. And of course one of the reasons I bought a 24" imac was to have lots of nice screen real estate for things like FCE, so I'd rather not do this work on the MPB unless I have to.


>But since you have a MacBook Pro, you can add a Firewire express card to the slot.

Shame there aren't express card slots on the iMac, I could run eSATA then!

>you could try daisy-chaining

I'll try that, but it means buying a 800 -> 400 cable

I was thumbing through a FCE book and the author specifically mentioned the problem with Canon cameras not playing nice on the FW bus. I can live with capturing to the system drive then moving to the external for scratch, but I would like to be able to monitor on a regular TV via FW. This works great with my Canon as long as the FW drive isn't plugged in.

Should I just look for a cheap Sony camera? I'm thinking of getting a used Digital8 camera to archive some old 8mm tapes I have. Do those usually support FW monitoring as well, and do Sony cameras play nice on the FW bus?