I am in the midst of my first HDV capture from my XHA1. After reading late into the night last night about what was the best capture solution (and making some silly mistakes) I started the camera capturing and transcoding to ProRes (standard quality) and went to bed. I woke up this morning to all my files captured...so I started the next tape. The camera has now finished going through the entire tape and is now "processing" the footage. This has resulted in the capture taking probably about 4-6x the original length of the tape. Its a 60 min tape that ran and has now been processing for an hour after reaching the end and is only 25% of the way through. Did I do something wrong? Does it really take this long to capture HDV and transcode to ProRes? I am using FCS2 6.0.5 on a Mac Pro dual core, dual 2.66 processor machine, 2gb Ram. The video is being captured to a WD 1TB drive hooked up via USB and the camera was hooked up via Firewire, but now it is just sitting since it has reached the end of the tape. If this is the actual time required to capture and go to ProRes, will it be much faster capturing HDV and then setting my timeline to ProRes and only transcoding the parts I need to render?? I am ok with that workflow...especially if it saves me hours of waiting for captures....

I think your problem might lie in the fact that your WD Hard drive is connected via a USB port. USB is not recommended even if you are capturing HDV natively...Perhaps you may want to try connecting the drive via Firewire 800 or capture it on a drive within your CPU....Hope it helps.

I guess I was thinking that USB 2.0 would be better than the slowed firewire since that is what I connected my cam to. Reading other posts it sounded like the firewire is throttled to the slowest device...which would be the cam at 100Mb/s....so I thought firewire 2 was faster. I guess I will try capturing the next tape to the internal drive and see if there is a change in time. Thanks for the input. Anyone know if my thinking is correct or should I switch to connecting the drive via firewire?

yup...capturing to the internal drive fixed the issue...I'll have to try connecting via firewire and see if I can still use this external drive. Thanks for the input...

no prob bob =)