Final Cut Pro - HDV Capture Problems

[hotwire132002]

I've been editing on a Mac Pro for the past year or so, but in the last few days I've started encountering a strange situation when trying to capture footage.

I have a Canon HV20 hooked up to the computer as a capture deck, and I use Capture Now to bring in footage. This will work fine for a few captures, but after two or three capture sessions I'll get a spinning beach ball for literally 30 seconds to a minute after hitting capture now. The capture window will then appear, trying to locate timecode for a few seconds, after which is starts capturing for a second or two and then claims it dropped frames. (I should mention that I've tried turning "Abort Capture on dropped frames" off, to no avail)

Restarting Final Cut won't fix the problem, however rebooting the computer will. Does anyone have any insight as to what might cause a problem like this? Thanks in advance!

 

[LethalWolfe]

Under FCP's System Settings do you have the "limit capture now" function turned on? If not, turn it on and set it to 60 minutes and see if that helps.


Lethal

 

[hotwire132002]

Under FCP's System Settings do you have the "limit capture now" function turned on? If not, turn it on and set it to 60 minutes and see if that helps.


Lethal

Thanks... I'll try that next time I run into issues. I'll post here once I do.

 

[MrLatte23]

Check your Hard Drives...

if you're recording to a RAID that's fallen asleep while you're cueing clips it could take about that long for the drives to spin up, just to drop frames and abort the capture. Single drives don't usually take that long to be ready. You ARE capturing to a drive other than your main drive, I hope.

Disksomnia is a great little free program to keep those drives a spinning, but only while FCP launched.

 

[hotwire132002]

Under FCP's System Settings do you have the "limit capture now" function turned on? If not, turn it on and set it to 60 minutes and see if that helps.


Lethal

OK, I just ran into the issue again today, and turning on "limit capture now" didn't help.

Regarding the question about whether I'm using a RAID that might be going to sleep -- I'm not using a RAID, and I don't think it's a hard drive sleeping issue either -- I've gone so far as to disconnect all my external drives (while capturing to an internal footage drive separate from the system drive) to try to solve the problem, to no avail. So far, the only solution seems to be a reboot... which wouldn't be a huge problem, except I'm constantly uploading 1+ GB files on a cable internet connection, so I have to wait for the uploads to finish before I can reboot... and that can set me back an hour or more at times.

I'm rambling (as I tend to do), but I don't suppose you might have any other thoughts on how to fix the problem? Regardless, thanks for your help so far! =)