FCE Capturing Question
 

I am new to FC Express having used iMovie until now. I have a question about capturing. Everytime I try and capture a clip using Capture Now my machine sits there forever saying "Allocating Disk Space". My machine will just sit there doing nothing for as long as I leave it, never capturing any clips. Am I doing something wrong? I am capturing via Firewire from my camcorder (Xl2 or old JVC DVP7) to a 160GB MiniPal drive attached to a Mac Mini with 1GB of RAM the drive just has 5GB of files on it. I can capture with no problems at all from either camcorder in iMovie.

Any pointers?

Colin

try logging the clips intead of using the capture now feature. Then highlight the clips in your bin and use the batch capture feature. Also check your capture settings and make sure they are correct.

mark

Thanks Mark,

I will give that a try.
How do you batch capture? I tried using the in/out points and can only see a way of capturing one clip at a time. The good news is that it did capture the one clip with no problems.

Colin

it may be the speed of your hard drive is the issue. i have a portable firewire hard drive mfg'ed. by a company named diskgo, and it worked fine capturing with imovie, but i had the *exact* same issue in working with FCP, the "allocating disk space"--then nothing happening. spinning beach ball. i swapped it out for a maxtor drive, which captured just fine. diskgo now houses my stock music library and stock images. so it's not a total waste, but it's for archive only purposes. which is fine. there's no such thing as too much storage space.

it's been a looooong time since i worked in FCE, which i did for about a minute. but isn't "batch capture" one of those features which they didn't include in FCE, to separate it from its pro big brother FCP? someone correct me if i'm wrong....as i said, i think i cut one project on FCE, total, so i'm no expert...but i'm thinkin' that's it.

The MiniPal drive I have is a 7200 RPM drive. Shouldn't that be fast enough? Or is it something to do with buffers in the drive? What speed is your diskgo?

Colin

once the clips are logged in your bin, click the top clip and hit "apple a"
then once they are all highlighted move yuor mouse cursor to the top clip and right click, you will see an option to batch capture.

Mark

Bear with me Mark, I am new to FCE so this may seem a dumb question.
How do you log clips? Haven't you already captured a clip to get it to show in the bin? Am I missing something basic here?

Colin

once you have set the in and out points on the clip hit the f2 button that should log the clip for you in the bin. then go through the previous step to batch capture. To answer your question no it isn't captured in the bin, if you log it. I also recommend you save your project once all the clips are logged. if your system crashes at least all of you logged clips are save with the timecodes. It's happened to me a million times so always save before you batch capture.
Mark

Thanks Mark,

I guess I never saw that in the docs. Fingers crossed this will all make sense and work soon.

Colin

hi colin: that diskgo HD is in my office, so i'd have to hook it up to let you know. i don't even know that speed is necessarily the issue because it's a FW drive. what i do know is that you described my issue perfectly, and that it was resolved by switching the hard drive. it took me a long time to figure this problem out, because of the fact that diskgo captured imovie perfectly. so maybe it's something with the buffering, i don't know. it might be worth finding a friend with an alternative HD before buying anything, just to test it out. maybe if there's an apple store near you, they'd let you hook one up for free.

Hi Meryem,

I tried on a different drive I have (also a 7200 RPM drive but this time a USB 2 drive) and that worked with no problem. Now I am wondering if the issue is because the MiniPal has built-in ports for FW and USB2. I was using the port on the drive to connect the camera. I went directly to the computer on the successful capture.

Colin

success! fabulous, glad to hear it....