I am shooting 1080i 24f on a Canon XH A1 and editing on a new Mac Pro with Final Cut Pro 6. I am using my camera as a deck, tethered to the Mac via firewire.

Is there a way of ingesting my tapes in one shot rather than having to select in and out points, and consequently end up playing each tape at least twice. Can I smply press play on the camera and record somewhere in FCP and copy the tapes to a hard drive and then log and capture into projects/timelines from there?

Thanks, Rich

When you invoke "Log & Capture" at the bottom right you'll see three buttons under the word Capture.

CLIP on the left
BATCH on the right

and in the center the lovely capture NOW button.

It does just that. Captures whatever is steaming in NOW.

The only issues are the speed of your system's throughput - the speed of your drives injest - whether you have timecode breaks or something else that will knock stop the capture - and drive capacity (when they get full, things stop!)

My recommendation is to limit Capture Now sessions to blocks of 15-20 minutes, not because longer doesn't work, but because if you get a failure, it's nice to be able to go back and just recapture the last block rather than, say, a 50 minute clip.

Good luck.