Can't initialize device!

[Michael Thames]

I've had my HV30, and XH-A1 for a couple of years now along with FCP II, and have had no problems until last night. I went to capture some video and got the "can"t initialize device warning".

I changed some capture presets but nothing seemed to work. So I tried to capture on my HV30 and got the same warning! I thought perhaps the firewire cable broke, but what is strange is when I click "Log and capture it turns on the Camera, and it starts to play back on the camera, but in FCP it won't capture.

Any ideas as to what it could be?

[Michael Thames]

Just got off the phone with Apple. The problem appears to be it was something with the tape. It's a Sony mini DV tape that captured fine the other day, only thing I did different was I put the lens cap on and recorded to clear the tape, and then recorded new video over that. Is this not good to do?

[Joel Peregrine]

Hi Michael,

Originally Posted by Michael Thames

Just got off the phone with Apple. The problem appears to be it was something with the tape. It's a Sony mini DV tape that captured fine the other day, only thing I did different was I put the lens cap on and recorded to clear the tape, and then recorded new video over that. Is this not good to do?

That's fine. I reuse tapes all the time. I've had finicky connections occasionally but cycling the camera on and off and restarting the computer fixes the problem. Other things to try are trashing final cut pro's preferences. This is a handy and free app for that:

Preference Manager for Final Cut Studio - Trash Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro Preferences - Restore and backup

...or restarting the computer with the p, r, option and ctrl keys held down. Wait for two chimes and then let it start up as normal. This resets a lot of the computer's preferences and can fix problems with no danger to your data.

[Michael Thames]

Hi Joel, Yea the first thing I did was trash preferences last night, that really didn't do anything. The strange thing is it captures only if I have the tape running in the camera, where as before I could control my camera from the computer. Sometimes it seems to work that way but other times it won't.

I'm thinking I have to re-install final cut. I've never done that before, it sounds scary.

[Cris Hendrix]

Sounds to me like it might be a firewire cable or port issue. If it does the same thing with both cameras you know it's not a camera issue. Try capturing with the camera being the only firewire device connected, also try another cable and other firewire devices on that port to see if there are any issues

[Michael Thames]

Originally Posted by Cris Hendrix

Sounds to me like it might be a firewire cable or port issue. If it does the same thing with both cameras you know it's not a camera issue. Try capturing with the camera being the only firewire device connected, also try another cable and other firewire devices on that port to see if there are any issues

Yes that's what I thought it was a broken firewire or port, but the port showed it was working in Systems Profiler. The funny thing is, it now works fine with any other tape except this one tape in-particular. However I used this tape the other day and captured footage from it but after clearing it and rerecording over it, it won't capture.

Final Cut keeps saying can't initialized device. Weird!