Getting the footage from CF to FCP
 

Shot a dance recital with the Z7 and I'm trying to get the footage off the card using the log and capture. I've downloaded the newest plugin from Sony.

When I go to log and capture all I'm getting is the warning that the deck is not recognized but that I can use capture now.

I can't find anyway to capture the footage.

What am I missing?

BTW ... I shot this in SD 16:9.

Thanks -

Do you have fcp 6.0.3 installed? Also you cannot have an external deck or firewire camera connected at the same time you are trying to capture.

Bruce

You need to use Log and Transfer to transfer the files from the CF card to the computer.
You can use Log and Capture if you use the Flash Card unit as a VTR and 'play' back the files, but this happens in realtime, just like playing back from a tape.

Bruce ... seems we just went through this not too long ago. I originally couldn't get it to work because I was on 6.0.3 ... then Sony updated the plug in and I was able to capture with no problems. That was a few weeks ago.

Fast forward to today and I seem to be back at square one.

I have no deck and the camera is not connected.

The firewire is connected directly to the unit that came with the camera.

do you have leopard & time machine?

supposedly it is very easy to say "put my mac back to the way it was on Thursday" if it was working on Thursday but not on Friday.

I know that some updates a while killed FCP's connection to my JVC HD10, I had to go back to an older OS to capture footage.

all I can really say is turn everything off & back on. un-plug & re-plug every firewire cable too.

good luck & let us know what you find out

I have never been able to get my CF unit to work with any of the plug in versions.
I am now on leopard 10.5.3 and final cut studio 2 6.0.3.

The frustrating thing is that I can see he CF on the desktop and see the files, I have also loaded them into mpegstreamclip so there must be a bug somewhere.

I checked this with sony and they confirmed that the plug in was installed in the correct place but havent come up with any fix yet.

I have also tried my sandisk firewire card reader and it still does not see the files in the log and transfer window even though they are there on the desk top.

I'm working on getting another project out right now, but I'm sure I'll be getting back to this one and it's problems by the first of next week.

There's been a lot of wasted down-time since I made the switch to HD cameras. I hope this isn't a sign of things to come.

What I meant was on VU, you and a few others were trying to get me through this exact same thing just about three or four weeks ago. I could not for the life of me get the log and transfer thing to come up. Then someone posted the latest version of the Sony plug in and bang ... I had it.

Now it's as if I'm starting all over again with the same problems. Re-loaded the Sony plug-in and still ... nothing.

Heck ... even footage from my nNovia doesn't appear to be transferring properly.

You've been quite helpful through all of this and I appreciate it.

Thanks -

Scott

I feel your pain Scott and I certainly did not mean to be redundant on this. I have had no problems in this area, but I know a couple other people have had on and off issues logging and transferring. Hopefully you will figure something out that no one else has and this will clear up. Keep us posted and I am sorry I can't be more help.

Bruce

Sorry I don't mean to hijack the thread but this brings up a question for me. I'm am in the market and currently leaning toward the Z7.

You can't just click and drag the files from the CF to a folder on your computer?

I've worked with the Focus DTE Disk Recorder, and have always manually dragged clip from the drive to my computer, and imported folders of clips into FCP as needed.

I take it either the Sony CF unit functions different or I'm missing something really important in the Log and Transfer process.

I've just had the Z7 for three days so I did not have time to experiment extensively, but the first series of shots that I recorded on the CF-card were immediately recognised by Adobe Première Elements, when I put the CF-card in the card-reader slot of my portable PC. I just had to drag them to the timeline and editing the clips from then on was a piece of cake. It will even work faster if I use a external CF-cardreader, because the internal readers in laptops are known for their slow transfer rate. Should work with any other NLE, too, I suppose. Great camera, by the way. You can't go wrong buying one.

Problem capturing all of the clip into FCP.
 

Hey guys, I have a Transcend 32gb 133x card.

I have recorded a concert and the file goes for like just over 2 hours. It is one entire clip when I see the file in FCP (using the Log and Transfer) option and I have the latest version of FCP and also using the Sony Plugin.

I'm using the CF recording unit that came with the Z7 and have it on its mount with the battery, connected via Firewire.

It starts to capture the footage fine, but seems to always drop out after a few minutes. When I add the clip to the queue again it sometimes captures the same length or a different length.

I'm wondering if this is because it doesn't like the write speed of the card or something else. I'm recording it to my external drive which is a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition, which is connected to my macbookpro via firewire 800.

Anyone had this problem?
Thanks,

Did you format the drive as HFS or did you leave it as FAT-32? FAT-32 is practically useless on a mac with long media files... nothing but problems.

You sure can. That is my workflow: Copy the m2t and idx files to a folder in a hard drive during the shoot. Later I just import everything in one session of Log & Transfer.
The trick for the FCP/Sony plug-in is that the m2t files must be in a "HVR" folder within a "VIDEO" folder, otherwise they cannot be recognized.

Hi Tim,

It came already formatted as a HFS drive. I have also tried saving it to another external drive with same issue.

I had exactly the same problem with Final Cut 6.0.3. The solution seems to be to use a USB card reader, not a Firewire card reader - even though I had no camera or deck connected via Firewire while using Log and Transfer. This fixed the problem for me.

I now have a problem where some files will not transfer. The Log and Transfer window displays all the files, but when I transfer some of the files result in the red exclamation which I guess means there's been some sort of error, but there's no more info I can use to try and diagnose the problem. I've tried using Log and Transfer to access the CF card, and I've also tried copying the VIDEO folder from the CF card to the Desktop. The files play using VLC and I can import them into Premiere Pro CS3. But not Final Cut. I've tried shortening filenames (was suggested elsewhere), and there seems to be no connection between filesize/video length and the files that fail.

Anyone got any ideas?