GL2 and external firewire drives
 

My GL1 will not capture if daisy chained via an external firewire drive. It captures just fine to an internal drive. This occurred with both an iMac and a Dell laptop and on Maxtor and WD external drives. I've read complaints from others having the same problem with a number of Canon videocameras.

How about the GL2? Is the firewire protocol implemented any better in the GL2? I did read that there were substantial differences between the two when using FCP so I'm hopeful.

Thanks.

I've had no problem capturing to an external FW drive with my gl2. Never tried it with the gl1.

Barry

XM2 here - 4 external Maxtor firewire drives: 60gb; 80gb and 2 x 120gb. All capture and PTT through my Dell Inspiron Laptop.

I've not had a problem capturing video from my GL2 to my external Acom 80GB 7200rpm firewire drive, but I do have a problem playing back video from the firewire drive w/ windows media player etc. It plays back fine in Premiere, but if you try to read the file itself, everything gets black/yellow/purple pixel boxes. Strange. Anyway, GL2 should be fine capturing to a external firewire HD.

Michael

it all depends
 

on where the winds are blowing. FW capture is one of those black arts like SCSI termination. Whether it works with an external depends on the chip the external drive uses (oxford bridge,yada yada), the length of the cable, how good the cables are, how fragmented the drive is, the rotation speed of the drive..that's all I can think of. The fastest defragged drives with good cables can generally allow capture but trying it through multiple drives is an exersize in ... potential futility. I have three externals and I never capture through them since I just won't put up with the headache when it doesn't work, but I have done so in the past on occasion. Try to capture directly to an internal if at all possible, or make sure your externals are fast, defragged, with short, good firewire cables and the latest oxford bridge.

Is there any way to capture directly to the external drive without going through the laptop?

No, you can't just plug a camera into a drive and transfer. There needs to be a controller etc. I wouldn't eliminate something like this in the future though.

FireWire capture on Macs is very stable and not at all like SCSI, it's true plug and play (even on my 4200rpm PowerBook drive).

You can sort of capture straight to some drives without going through a laptop. There are several vendors that make firewire capture drives that hook straight to the camera. Once you are done shooting you just hook the drive to the computer for editing. Not cheap though, I think they typically cost about $1000.