6 I-MAC’S with the same fire wire problem
 

At Timberline secondary school we house 6 G3 I-MAC’S running under OS X witch we teach the “basics of editing” to high school students on. our main editing application on the I-Macs is I Move 2 with all of the “slick” plugins. Over the past few days ALL of the 6 I-MAC’S have failed to Capture and Export videos via fire-wire to our Sony TRV 240 Digital-8 camcorders, although it dose work with our older TRV 120’s.
These computers are Vital to the class and it is disaster’s that they all went at the same time. If any one has any suggestions on how to solve this problem please do so.
Thanks in advanced

Alex

Maybe its your Sony TRV 240 Digital-8. Not the computers.

Alex,
I'd check with the Apple KnowledgeBase and support forums. Also worth checking is Mac Fixit.

Your description suggests two possibilities: something has gone funky with the TRV 240 camera or something has changed on all of the iMacs, perhaps a software update?

Good luck.

we have 4 TRV 240’s and tried all of them, so I don’t think it’s the camera. I am checking that link as I type this.

thanks for the help

Alex

PS; the I-macs do work with Fire-Wire Hard Drives

Do you know off-hand what version of Mac OS you're using on those iMacs?

Its Just the Normal Mac OS X version 10 I think. I got to admit IM usually don’t deal with the Macs (I no more PC stuff) so I am in new territory with this one. thanks for the ripples, and please keep them coming in

Alex

Well as a point of reference for your investigation, the most current version of the Mac OS is 10.2.3. It's worth checking your Macs, something easily done by clicking the Apple logo in the upper left corner of the screen and selecting "About This Mac". This displays a basic information panel showing the OS version, owner's name and memory.

Clicking "More Info" from that point invokes the System Profiler which shows darn near everything about that Mac. If you go that far you might want to connect one of the cameras and see if it shows up on the Firewire bus.

I checked the system profile and the OS is 10.2.3 I also checked the advanced setting in the profile and found the appropriate pull-down for the fire-wire info, and there was nothing about active bus, or a device connected. I think it said “device ejected”

Alex

one of my colleges Just got off the phone with apple tech support and they told him that the camera is not supported buy them, but I swear that they have worked with the computers before. what’s up with that?

Alex

Alex,
Here's the Apple Camcorder Compatibility page. Unfortunately, the Sony TRV 240 is not on the list. (Note that the list of cameras appears a tiny bit dated.)

Hope this is helpful, although probably very disappointing.

Hello every body. I would like to thank every body for their quick response on this question, it really was urgent. It sounds as if the school is going to be trading the 240’s in for some older TRV-120’s, or replacing them with some TRV18’s.
Once again thanks for the support

Alex