Capture issue in FCP6
 

Hey Guys,

Searched this one to death, but can't find any actual solutions.

I finally got around to borrowing an XL1s to capture some footage on the new Mac Pro and have a play with FCS2. Aftering scouring the house for an hour to find a DV cable I gave up and went out an bought one, plugged the camera in, started FCP, went to Log and Capture and...

*insert synthesized game show "wrong answer" sound effect here*

It captures for about three seconds, but then says: "Capture encountered a problem reading the data on you source tape. This could be due to a problem with the tape. Capture has been aborted and your clip has been saved"

I've tried half a dozen different tapes (all of which play in the camera just fine) and the same thing happens with each one of them. Any ideas guys?

I know the XL1 and XL1s had some firewire issues with Macs in the past. Do you have any other firewire devices connected to the computer while capturing? If so, try unplugging them and see if it helps (although you've probably already tried that). It also seems like FCP 6 may have its own firewire issues, based on what I read here. I'm still on 5.x and a dual G5 so unfortunately I can't help there but hopefully someone else can.

This also happens with misaligned heads, causing the data stream to have errors in it that the camera doesn't display.

Is manhandling the heads back into alignment an option? I'm a bit peaved at having wasted hours of my time and $30 on a DV cable that I don't really need, all to simply capture some footage to play around with.

*grumble, groan*

Not when the track width on a DV tape is measured in µm (thousandths of a millimeter). Doesn't take much more than a hard knock to get the mechanism out of whack.

Were the tapes being captured shot on the same camera? Were they shot in LP mode? Both of those questions are related to head alignment.

Head alignment isn't the guaranteed culprit though, I just mentioned it because I know I've had the same issue from the problem. Everything mentioned above could be looked at in addition.

Most of the tapes I tried were shot in the camera, in SP as far as I know.

Well I switched cameras (to an old Panasonic gs150) put in a fresh tape and tried again - same problem, it captures just 3 seconds and then stops with the same message. I've tried both the old firewire cable that came with the camera and the new one I've just bought, doesn't change the problem.

Any suggestions? I really have to capture this new footage - the project needs to be finished and on DVD by Sunday night. Would really appreciate some help on this one. I'm wondering if there might be a problem with my firewire ports on the new Mac Pro (though that seems unlikely, this is the first time I've even used them).

Cheers,

Mark

what are your capture settings? Are you batch capturing? Or does it not even get that far?

Capture settings are: DVCpro - PAL 48kHz & PAL Firewire

I've tried DV50 - PAL 48kHz and PAL Firewire Basic (and all variations of those four options), but they don't work either. Don't get far enough to be able to batch capture.

I finally got it sorted out. Had to switch all my capture settings from PAL DVCpro to plain old PAL DV. But everything seems to be working correctly now. Thanks for your help guys.

For the record (if anyone else comes up with the same problem) make sure you check exactly which codec your footage was shot in. In my case (using a Canon XL1s) it was PAL DV - switch all of your capture setting to that format and it should hopefully correct the problem.