Firewire drive HDV troubleshoot
 

So, Im using a firewire 400 with my powerbook G4, 1 ghz processor, 1GB RAM. Im editing HDV footage from a Sony fx1, and the firewire drive continually freezes and crashes. It's a Fantom drive - which has given me problems before.

Are there better brands of drives? Or is it the HDV footage that's too big? If the drive is being tempermental, am I in danger of losing the captured footage?

I borrowed a Fantom firewire drive recently with lots of M2T and Cineform AVI already on it, and it worked remarkably well, much to my surprise. I am inclined to test how many layers of video it will handle before something hits a bottleneck.

I think you either have a bad drive or a problem with your firewire port.

Re: Firewire drive HDV troubleshoot
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Zev Suissa : So, Im using a firewire 400 with my powerbook G4, 1 ghz processor, 1GB RAM. Im editing HDV footage from a Sony fx1, and the firewire drive continually freezes and crashes. It's a Fantom drive - which has given me problems before.

Are there better brands of drives? Or is it the HDV footage that's too big? If the drive is being tempermental, am I in danger of losing the captured footage? -->>>

what software are you musing to edit the footage?if it's iMovie or FCE-HD, rememeber that these programmes transcode HDVinto the AppleIntermediateCodec which is 4-5 times larger than the original HDV and may start to test the bandwidth of standard FireWire, especially if you're trying to do realtime effects with more than one image stream.

Yes Dylan, FCE-HD. But I haven't even started with effects yet - this is on the normal playback of the rough cut. I already put the video playback quality on low... and frames are still dropping. In adddition to dropped frames, the firewire freezes and I have to reboot the computer.

Any ideas?

firewire trouble
 

You might check into the compatability of your cam and the firewire card. There are some cam's, my old GL2 would do the same thing when I plugged into a bus used by an external drive at the same time. Try unplugging the external drive and capture to internal hard drive and then connect the external and move the file to it.

I am assuming your setup, sorry.

Jeff