I had a kind of similar issue.

Everything "used to work" SD and HDV, no problems over firewire.
This was with FCE 3.0

"upgraded" to 10.4.9, and HDV still worked but SD I had the exact issue -- dropped frames after 15 seconds or so.

Eventually I shelled out for FCE3.5 as the issue was supposed to only be with FCE 3.0 but I haven't gone back and tried to pull in any SD footage yet (HDV works fine)

Ok , guys, appreciate all this for sure, but what should I do?
Maybe uncheck preference to abort on dropped frames?
Also, I don't have to capture with the FCP express -- I just backup up the footage to hard drive in full, so what else could I use? (mac) or any other ideas?

Something is not right.
The Seagate 750 has much better performance than your test speed.
A single internal drive should see speeds around double your results.
For example, I just ran a speed test on a 2 x 750 RAID that only has 488 Gigs of free space left, and my write speed was 131.9 MB/s and my read speed was 129 MB/s.
What type of Mac, how many drives, how are they configured & connected?

Eric's suggestions are good from a very top level view, but the problem is that OS X doesn't give control over transfer modes on an ATA device. DMA is a Windows thing.

These days when FCP throws dropped frame errors, it often has something to do with errors in the DV stream. I realize this makes no sense, but it's true.

Try capturing with a different camera/deck. When a deck can't read a tape perfectly, it throws errors in the stream which in turn makes FCP behave this way.

Yes, turn it off. I work with FCP since version 3, whenever I upgrade it's the first thing I check out. And usually it's the first thing I turn off, because I've had so many troubles with it.

David: I don't know anything about speed and what they should be, but all my externals, lacies and seagates say about 30mb, and the one internal, the mac HD comes in at 44. Everything is pretty new.

Nate, I only have my two new brand new Sony HD camcorders I just bought. that's it. They are not good? they seem to play back these tapes fine (looking at lcd)

thanks you Theodore! So Theo, by unchecking this safegaurd are you giving up any great thing there?

1) BTW, we all agree that the is not about any real dropped frames correct? this has not be clearified, yet it's an important point.
2) Theo, others, or..should I expore other software, or is unchecking this way go?

You could try other capturing software and see if you get the same errors. Then you'll know if there's a problem with just that program or system-wide.

You could turn off the abort option and just watch it look for glitches as it's capturing. Most likely the errors are false. :)

Eric

I come across this problem on occaision myself. What I do is go to the Capture Settings drop down menu and change it from Basic Firewire to non-controllable device and just push play from the camera and then Capture Now button. It then brings in the whole tape with no problem. I have done this a dozen or so times over the past several years. I'm running 10.4.8.

1) Call me Ted
2) I wouldn't think you need any other capturing software although I'm sure someone will point out that there is something better.
3) Marty Reinhardt is right, the "uncontrollable device" option is usually the best fail-safe. I have a friend in Australia who edited weddings on a G3 667mhz iBook and that was the only way he could successfully capture with that machine.

This is no guarantee that there are no actual dropped frames, it's just my experience that it's usually somewhere in the capture pipeline that the frames are being dropped.

Kevin,

Are your drives formatted HFS or HFS+ journaling?

I have a friend who bought a new USB2/FW400 hard drive and started using it without formatting it himself. It was pre-formatted for FAT-32, which the mac can read and write to, but is no where near as fast as HFS "Mac" format.

Anyway, my friend was having similar issues with dropped frames and speed problems. We formatted the drive as HFS+ and all the problems went away.
Some people think HFS+ causes its own problems and just use HFS, but I've never had a problem with journaling turned on.

INteresting Marty. What does this method do precisely? (as opposed to the normal route)

Eric: other software suggestions?

same to you Ted, what are doing when choosing 'uncontrollable device" -- thanks on the dropped frames analysis

thanks Tim, I have 6 drives or so. 1/2 are extended and 1/2 extended Journaled. I don't see where to find if they are hfs or hfs+ (looking in disc utility)

Hmm, I don't know as I don't own a Mac. :)

But apparently not many people know about the Google Mac search. Go to Google and then click Advanced Search. Then at the bottom, click Apple Macintosh.. Or just go to www.google.com/mac But at least you know how to get to it.

Just search for something like free dv capture software or something like that, I'm sure it'll turn up something. :)

Eric

You don't happen to have a few external firewire drives chained together on the same firewire buss as you are trying to capture from the camera are you?

David:
they are not daisy chained, but all go into one belkin hub right now, except one that is FW 800 that is going direct to back of computer.

I believe you can daisy chain the 800 bus, just put the slower drives past it in the chain.

I get about 34-35 megs/sec on my Maxtor OneTouchIII 300 gig Firewire 400/USB 2.0 drive. The Firewire side is usually a few megs/sec faster than the USB 2.0 side from benchmarks I've done. I can capture from my camera daisy chained to it without problems.

I read about Firewire hubs a couple of months ago. I think they're more of a convenience thing, but don't actually improve performance over daisy chaining if I remember correctly, because you're not increasing the bus speed on the computer, but you're not running through multiple devices, so it might be a little more efficient, I forget though.

Eric