odd camera/computer behaviour
 

Hi everyone,
I've been using Final Cut Pro for about a month now (switched for Premiere) and it's just awesome.
I do have a small issue however in terms of the computer (Dual G5) detecting my camera. The problem is that in order for the camera to be detected by FCP, I have to boot the computer with the camera on. If it gets turned off then I need to turn it on and restart again.
Is there something I can do about this or is it just a small bug I have to live with?
Thanks

If you have final cut 5.0...
just go to View>Refresh AV Devices.

But first make sure your firewire cable is connected and camera is turned on.
Should do the trick.

Is the camera a Canon perhaps? For some reason they tend to have a lot of issues with FCP. Do a search, or just browse through the Mac forum here for lots of discussion.

Also, have you seen the following? http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=49838

Actually, I should have been clearer - the camera is detected by FCP (it's controllable) but it gives me the dreaded "Preview Disabled" unless I boot with the camera turned on. And yes, it is a Canon - ZR-45. I shoot with an XL1 though and only use it to capture.
I tried the method mentioned in the link to get FCP to detect the camera - before I did that it wasn't detecting it at all, but it would be nice to be able to turn the camera on without having to reboot the whole computer.

I'm just not sure if there's a fix for this. There is something about Canon's implementation of ieee-1394 that doesn't seem to mix well with Apple's firewire. There have been a lot of posts on the topic here and elsewhere. For example:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=49843

If you have any luck solving the problem please let us know, I think a lot of people could benefit from your experience.

Well, the only way I've been able to solve it so far is to simply restart the computer with the camera on, so hopefully someone can benefit from that as a workaround. I was also having a problem with it not working when I connected my firewire 800 drive to the computer, so I currently use the firewire 400 on the front of the computer for the camera and plug the drive into a pci firewire 800 card and other than the restart issue, everything works very well.
I am hoping to find out why I need to restart to get fcp to detect the camera though, so I'll let everyone know if anything comes up.

I get exactly the same message with the XL2 (i.e. "Preview Disabled") but as soon as I send a motion command it disappears and video appears.

What do you mean by a motion command? Would that be like playing the tape, cause I tried that and it still says preview disabled.
By the way, I'm considering buying the XL2 for my job next summer - how is it with FCP? Does it have any audio sync issues like the XL1 does?
Thanks

Andrew,

Yes. Most of the time when I do this I hit the variable speed scan control to back up the tape a bit because I'm at the end of a recording and want to mark the "out" point for capture. Video immediately appears when I do this.

At the risk of violating the cross posting rule I'll mention that I just captured 22 minutes worth of XL2 audio/video with FCP5 and found them to be in a constant sync relationship througout the clip but offset from another by 2 frames. See my post in the Audio forum.