Can't capture in FCP
 

I am shooting my first big feature, and possibly the worst thing that could happen, happend.
Problem: CANT CAPTURE

Symptoms:
The HDV/DV IN and CH 1/2 flash off and on (one off one on, and so on)
When in the menu and go to Signal Setup "Playback STD" is flashing.
Final Cut Pro does not recognize camera is plugged in, nor does iMovie or Capture Magic.

Attempts to solve:
Try capturing through HV30 on my Powermac AND Macbook Pro with TWO different sets of firewire wires.

I have captured many hours of tape successfully before hand with BOTH cameras, I'm really just at a loss here
any help will be greatly appreciated, i will also post this in the final cut pro forum, who knows.

I have run into this issue as well. I have found that when FCP can't see my camera, I just have to redo the Easy Setup, so go to the apple menu, click Easy setup, then choose the appropriate preset (for me it is either HDV 1080i60 Firewire Basic or 1080p24 Firewire Basic)

Hope that helps!
-Steve

Try this:-

Quit FCP - dismount any external hard drives and re-start your computer.

After re-starting your computer - connect firewire cable and switch on camera.

Let the computer register your camera first, indicated by HDV In.

Connect external drives and fire up FCP. Should now be able to log and
transfer properly.

Did the trick for me on a mac.

"When in the menu and go to Signal Setup "Playback STD" is flashing"

That means you need to go into the camera menu and switch your playback standard to whatever standard was recorded. If you shot SD and your playback is HDV, then you have to change it to SD, and vice versa. Do this BEFORE you connect the camera to the computer via firewire. You switch it after you're connected, FCP won't talk to it.

I have two XH A1's and have had this problem intermittently for a while on both of them. I think it started when I tried to capture with FCP after using them exclusively on PCs without a problem for months. But I'm not sure.

I do all the things that the other posters have suggested and usually some combination of those actions gets the camera back to sanity. Others on the web have suggested that using a different firewire cable solves the problem but it sounds like you've already tried that.

One more thing to look out for: when the camera is connected to your Mac open the System Profiler and look under FireWire to see if it is listed there. If not, then the problem is likely nothing to do with FCP.

One of my cameras is now permanently in the flashing/no capture state even when it's not connected to anything. All Canon can suggest is that I box it up and send it to their service center, which I am now in the process of doing.

I hope you have better luck.

Bruce