I hope you are using FireWire 800.
Yep, that's 400. Are you capturing though a tape deck or cable from your camera? If it's the tape deck I would try to get a FireWire 800 cable or if your camera has a 800 port. What is the HD resolution (1080x1920 or 720x1280) you are capturing in and what do you have in Easy Setup? It could be that the 400 isn't fast enough so it's freezing up and "dying".
OK, those settings sound good. I think your problem is the slow cable. Does it display a dropping frames error message wen it stops or just what's in the screenshot?
Ok, how much space is available on the HD you are capturing to?
Then that's obviously fine. What are you computer specs?
This is quite confusing. I would PM a very knowledgeable member, -DH, he will probably be able to take a look at the thread and troubleshoot this. He might post here too. He seems to post in many Digital Video threads.
I can PM him or you can. I'll take care of it for you though.
Thanks..let me know what happens
I am trying to capture this footage in Hd. The capture window keeps freezing when it is processing the footage. What can be wrong?
I assume you're capturing HDV ... is that correct?
If so, HDV has a slightly lower data rate than DV (due to it's very high compression) so Firewire 400 will work fine. If the camcorder you're capturing from is connected to the same Firewire bus as the drive where the data is being captured, it will only capture at FW100 (camcorders and VTRs are FW 100 devices). But both DV and HDV data rates are still well under that.
I don't work with HDV, but I believe that during the capture process, FCE/FCP converts from HDV to AIC or ProRes which means the data processing (writing to the hard drive) will lag behind the capture - I could be wrong on this, but I don't think so.
Essentially, the computer has to take in the long GOP MPEG-2 stream (HDV) from the camera and convert it to a frame based format for editing. MPEG-2 only has one full frame ("I frame" ) for every 15. The 14 'frames' that follow the I frame only contain data that has changed since the I frame**. The rest of the data that was contained in those frames gets thrown out. That's how HDV is compressed so they can get 60 minutes of HD footage on the same tape that holds 60 minutes of SD footage.
So the computer has to create 14 frames for every GOP and that gets rather processor intensive and the capture lags.
If it isn't HDV, then I'd suspect a data rate or throughput issue.
-DH
I don't work with HDV, but I believe that during the capture process, FCE/FCP converts from HDV to AIC or ProRes which means the data processing (writing to the hard drive) will lag behind the capture - I could be wrong on this, but I don't think so.
Essentially, the computer has to take in the long GOP MPEG-2 stream (HDV) from the camera and convert it to a frame based format for editing. MPEG-2 only has one full frame ("I frame" ) for every 15. The 14 'frames' that follow the I frame only contain data that has changed since the I frame**. The rest of the data that was contained in those frames gets thrown out. That's how HDV is compressed so they can get 60 minutes of HD footage on the same tape that holds 60 minutes of SD footage.
So the computer has to create 14 frames for every GOP and that gets rather processor intensive and the capture lags.
If it isn't HDV, then I'd suspect a data rate or throughput issue.
-DH
This is all very interesting, but I thought that GOPs and I-frame where only used in compressing, esp. for the web. So when capturing HDV FCP automatically converts to MPEG-2 using I-frames and GOPs? Is there a way to avoid this by using AIC or ProRes? I read the tutorial on Kenstone.net and I didn't catch anything about converting to MPEG-2.
So no to I-frames and GOPs. No to converting to MPEG-2 because it IS MPEG-2. Capture with ProRes. What exactly does ProRes do? Convert the video to a different format, compress it with a codec? I get the HDV thing, finally I think.
What should i do about it freezing?