Howdy ho, I recently set up a portable editing system using a G4 Laptop w/ 1 GB of ram, a SONY GV-D1000 Mini-DV deck and the Adaptec card to expand my firewire ports from one to four.

Although my system has no problem recognizing the external drive named "GIGI" and I am able to operate the mini-dv deck from any of the four ports, Final Cut Pro 4 seems to have problems when it comes time to digitize. It hangs, seeming to decide where to put stuff. If I designate my internal drive as the scratch disk I have no problems, similarly, if I hit esc a few times when FCP seems to hang when GIGI is set as the scratch disk I am able to get media on the external drive. I am not however able to manually digitize.

Anyone out there have similar problems or ideas on how to make the Iomega work better with FCP4?

Thank you!

apple does not officially support external firewire drives for FCP. However, if you visit the apple.com FCP support board (click on support>discussions>final cut pro) you will probably get enough help to solve your problem.

Hey Denis, thanks for the tip. I will check it out.

As you are using FireWire to import and this takes up bandwidth there is a blockage as you are also sending down the same FireWire line to import it to the external leaving little room for errors.

Thanks Paul - yes, everything seems much slower and I have to handhold my digitizing tool.

Any suggestions on how to work this out? I don't want to have to use my internal drive to digitize and I can get the IOMEGA to work its just slow and I'm hardly able to run a batch up logged clips.

How about capturing to your internal drive them moving the clips off to the ext HD when finished capturing?

Have you tried plugging one device in the laptop's firewire port and the other device into the adaptec firewire card? This way they don't share the same bus.

The other thing I can think of is that the Iomega drive may not be that good a firewire drive. Do you know what chipset/bridge it uses? The oxford 911 chip is the best for firewire 400.