My system freezes when capturing video material in OSX, any ideas why this is happening? I am using a powerbook G4 Titanium with Final Cut Pro. When digitizing DV material through firewire in "capture now mode" I am only able to capture one clip. When I attempt to capture the second clip it causes the computer to freeze up during the second capture, although the deck keeps running and the computer captures, final cut does not respond. System must be rebooted. If I reboot between each clip, I do not have the problem. Batch capture works poorly too and is unable to find clips, and also freezes. I have up graded / and completely reloaded the operating system from OS 10 to OS 10.3, Final Cut from 3 to 4.5 to Final Cut HD, tried three different deck types, new firewire cables and NOTHING solves the problem. Please note on this same computer, I have no problem using OS9 with Final Cut 3. Any ideas?

I, too, have problems with Capture Now every once in a while; when I try to stop caputuring by pressing ESC, FCP continues recording to disk until the disk is full or until I hard restart the computer (Force Quit does not work). When this happens, I run Disk Warrior on both the startup disk and the caputure drive, and it usually finds errors in one or both of the directories. Rebuilding the directory has always solved the problem for me.

I would probably start where Rob suggested and run a diagnostic utility or two on your machine.

If you don't own one you can find a number of excellent FREE ones on http://www.versiontracker.com

I would recommend ONYX, which runs all the built in diagnostics that OSX has such as repairing permissions and running the clean up subroutines that might not always get run.

Try that and let us know if it makes any difference

Hello Pam,

Do you have any other processes running during capture?

Any antivirus applications?

Peter

What version of 10.3.x are you using? Have you deleted FCP preferences? If not, see the notice at the top of the forum. Upgrading software will not update the preference file in most cases. What version of quickTime are you using also?

Thank you for the informative responses! Rob accurately described my problem. I will try his suggestion, disk warrior, first. I do alot of capturing files, dragging them to various external and internal harddrives, and deleting all by click and drag. Is this creating a problem for the computer? I have manualsphobia and have not learned to use media manager. Regarding other questions/suggestions: Norton Antivirus is loaded on computer, however it is not running. I am running OSX 10.3.4 with Quicktime 6.5.1. Quicktime, when open with other programs, causes other progams to crash. Many thanks again!

Have you deleted the FCP preferences file, if not see the notice at the top of the forum. Is FCP and and the other files in the default location or have you moved the application? You've got some big issues if QT is causing other programs to crash. You might need to do a clean install of your system OS and upgrade to 10.3.4 again. But I would try Disk Warrior and deleting the FCP preferences file first.