XH-A1 capture problem
 

Hello all,

I'm having kind of a weird problem, but I'm hoping someone can shed some light. I shot a 30 minute presentation for a teaching credential yesterday.

It was shot at 1080i 60. I'm using Final Cut Pro 5.1.4. I used Easy Setup for an HDV - 1080i60 timeline. I used capture now and the process started fine. In the 28th minute, there appears to be a defect in the tape that causes a slight stutter, then the capture continues.

The problem: so what's happening is that the capture finishes and then writes the clip to the Browser. However, the clip is only the two minute clip after the glitch. The large clip (28 minutes) is sitting in the capture scratch, but it's unreadable and doesn't get written to the browser.

Any help or thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Michael

As a stop gap measure I'd try and capture the first 27 minutes - then manually stop the capture to get the bulk of the clean footage. Then try and capture around the glitch.

Not ideal, but at least you'll get the footage into the computer.

Trish

You may get a better capture if you log the cuts and then capture. This usually works well for me when I get a drop out. Depending on how bad the tape is, you may have a couple seconds of drop out due to the long GOP of HDV. Having a b-roll minimizes the risks of losing footage while shooting events.

Yeah, man, definitely cut it up into like 5-10 minute sections. Maybe try capture using "non-controllable device" in you capture prefs. That might make it skip over the glitch and disregard the section where no info is coming in. That's what I'd try. Good luck.

Thanks for the reply Trish. The only way I see to manually stop the capture is to hit "esc". I tried this and it stopped the capture, but didn't write the processed clip to the browser or the capture scratch. How else can you stop the capture?

Michael

This sounds like a good idea Doug, I'll give the logging a try.

Thanks,

Michael

Thanks Steve. Unfortunately, the project calls for continuous footage (no breaks). I will however, try the non-controllable device thing.

Thanks,

Michael

Using the escape key is the only way I know how to stop it in progress actually. If the footage is clean up until that point it should be writing to the scratch though. Maybe it's not a tape glitch issue.

I wonder if it's an issue with the continuous length and your machine having trouble handling the giant file.

I haven't tried capturing anything longer than ten minutes or so but I'm about to try that on some footage I took last night.

Does anyone know if you can run into issues with long segments?

trish

There have been reports of problems with Capture Now

Larry Jordan recommends always having In and Out points set and capture the clip.

Don't know if this is related to your problem, but thought I'd throw it out there.

Yeah, I was also thinking. The escape key approach probably doesn't grab the last clip you were in the middle of - so if your clip was one big one - it may not grab the clip for that reason.

In and out points sounds like the best approach under the circumstances.

trish

Thanks again Trish. I was also thinking to try and downconvert to SD in-camera, however, the option in the menu is greyed out and not available. The manual isn't very helpful. Does anyone know how to enable this feature?

Thanks,

Michael

disconnect the firewire cable, then dive into the menu to select downconvert ON, then reconnect firewire cable. It's in the manual... just kind of encrypted :)

Bill

Thanks Bill, that did the trick.

Well, down-converting in the camera solved the problem. I'm not sure if the clip length was the root cause, but SD is definitely more long-clip friendly. I was able to put the two clips together with minimal disruption. Thanks to all for the help and guidance.

Michael

Similar capture issue
 

I recently purchased an A1 & shot some footage on it yesterday. The camera is set to 1080i/60i with the down convert turned off (per manual instructions).

When I opened the project in FCP, I did the Easy Setup for HDV.

The capture was glitchy. I would capture "Clip" and half the time I would get a timecode error message. I would just try it again and usually it would begin capture.

No matter what I did, I only got video with no audio.

I tried all the settings on the camera & in FCP that I could to no avail.

I tried to customize my capture preferences too, but the HDV preferences are locked and the Edit & Duplicate buttons are greyed out.

And not only no audio, but the video shows up unrendered on the timeline.

Any ideas?

I posted this in the NLE Mac forum but do not have an answer so I will try here too.

For everyone having the capture problems with FCP and the XHA1, was there ever a resolution?

I have two A1's and an HV20 and have tried capturing using multiple combinations of the cameras, my Powerbook and G5 (both running FCP6) and 500GB USB drive and my TB FW800 drive There are no timecode breaks on the raw tape, I basically hit record and let it go and I end up with anywhere from 2-5 video files from the one capture. This is frustrating!!