Panasonic NV-DX100 and Mac

[berrie94]

Hello,

I have an Panasonic NV-DX100 Videocamera here, and I have an iMac C2D with Snow Leopard. The problem is that my Mac doesn't recognize my videocamera. I have an DV <-> Firewire 800 cable, I have tried iMovie, FCP, Premiere but they don't recognize the Panasonic DV camera. Is this camera too old, or is it incompatible with the Mac? Can somebody help me?

 

[spinnerlys]

Take a look at Applications / Utilities / System Profiler > Hardware > Firewire if the camera is even recognised while the camera is set to VCR/PLAY.

 

[berrie94]

I have checked but there is only: Speed: 800 Mb/sec Speed

 

[advres]

weird, I have never seen a fw800 to 6-pin fw400 cable before.

 

[LethalWolfe]

I have checked but there is only: Speed: 800 Mb/sec Speed

If you don't see the camera listed the Mac is nothing seeing it. Either the FW port on the camera is bad, the FW cable is bad or the FW port on the Mac is bad. Do you have another device, like a FW HDD, that you could test the cable with? There is also the possibility that going from FW800 to FW400 is the culprit. I know FW800 is supposed to be backwards compatible but some of our decks that have FW400 just flat out will not be recognized by our Macs when we use FW800 to FW400 cables. If we hook the same deck up to the same machine using FW400 to FW400 it works fine.

weird, I have never seen a fw800 to 6-pin fw400 cable before.

We have some of those as well as FW800 to 4-pin FW400 for compatibility w/our Macs that don't have FW400 anymore.


Lethal

 

[spinnerlys]

I have checked but there is only: Speed: 800 Mb/sec Speed

Then the camera is not recognised correctly.
Sometimes it helps, when the computer is shut off, the camera put into VCR mode and then starting the computer. Or you could try another cable.
I assume you use a 4-pin to 9-pin Firewire cable?

weird, I have never seen a fw800 to 6-pin fw400 cable before.

4-pin to 9-pin cable

9-pin to 6-pin cable (FW800 to 6-pin FW400)

 

[advres]

4-pin to 9-pin cable

9-pin to 6-pin cable (FW800 to 6-pin FW400)

Dammit, I meant 4-pin not 6-pin!

And no I have never seen a 9-pin to 4-pin. Thanks, I didn't know they existed. You can see I have completely moved over from tapes huh?

 

[spinnerlys]

Dammit, I meant 4-pin not 6-pin!

And no I have never seen a 9-pin to 4-pin. Thanks, I didn't know they existed. You can see I have completely moved over from tapes huh?

Lucky bastard? Hmm, I'm kind of glad we still use tapes with our multi-cam show (which this year seems to have only four cameras instead of eight), we once shot XDCam HD and the Mac Pro 3,1 had quite some problems displaying a 2-camera-group, because of using AMA.

 

[advres]

Lucky bastard? Hmm, I'm kind of glad we still use tapes with our multi-cam show (which this year seems to have only four cameras instead of eight), we once shot XDCam HD and the Mac Pro 3,1 had quite some problems displaying a 2-camera-group, because of using AMA.

Not really lucky it's just a complete different hassle. I actually miss capturing from HDCam tapes.

This show I am working on now is mixed media from XDCam HD, 5d mkII, GoPro HD and a Sony lipstick cam. Can you guess how long I am going to be transcoding all this footage? Answer = a metric shiat ton.

PS - sorry for hijacking your thread OP!!!!

 

[spinnerlys]

Not really lucky it's just a complete different hassle. I actually miss capturing from HDCam tapes.

This show I am working on now is mixed media from XDCam HD, 5d mkII, GoPro HD and a Sony lipstick cam. Can you guess how long I am going to be transcoding all this footage? Answer = a metric shiat ton.

PS - sorry for hijacking your thread OP!!!!

I meant "lucky bastard" more in a sarcastic way I guess. As nice as those tapeless formats are, they are too differing from each other and seldom compatible with editing applications (if one does not use AMA or the like) and transcoding is really a stupid hassle. One show I had/have to capture uses XDCam, the import of 50 minutes of footage takes 30 minutes and then one has to use another 30 minutes for transcoding it to DV50, the standard on many broadcasting stations these days. Why don't they shoot with DVCam or DVCPro in the first place anyway.

HD might be a different animal though.


Anyway, OP, do you have access to another Firewire cable or can get a new one? Or can you get your hands on another DV camera? Has a restart helped? One of your capture Macs (G4 PowerMac with FW400 ports) sometimes has to be restarted two to three times to actually read the camera, now it has given up though.

 

[berrie94]

It works fine now. I have restarted my Mac with the camera in VCR mode, and after the restart he recognized the camera.

Thanks for all the help!