This has nothing whatsoever to do with capturing video. It has to do with using the external preview function IN Vegas 6.0 where the media being played is on a firewire drive connected to a 3 port firewire card. The video camera which goes out to the TV monitor is also connected to the firewire card. When I enable the external preview and hit play, the video becomes intermittent (on again, off again), there isn't a constant signal being sent to the camera while the hard drive is being accessed. Basically it goes from the video for a second or so, then to the standard no signal blue screen of the camera, back and forth like that...Does anyone have a fix for this or has encountered it before? The HD is a western digital 120GB, and I've tried the preview with two cameras, a Canon ZR20 and my Panasonic DVC80..

It's obviously some sort of issue about perhaps the firewire card not giving equal priority to the camera or something like that, not sure though...

Out of curiosity, what happens if you daisy-chain the camera to the hard drive?

That's an excellent question; but first I have to ask, what does "daisy chain" mean? =(

By daisy-chain, I mean firewire from computer to hard drive and then firewire from hard drive to camera. The camera is daisy-chained through the hard drive (which is how my laptop is hooked to my deck since I only have a single firewire port).

ahhh I get it, I'll try that and let you know! That thought never even crossed my mind, was wondering why the HD had two firewire ports on it..Stay tuned, I will post my results..

I don't think that daisy chain Idea works at all. I did what you said and and when I turned on the power to the firewire hard drive, it wasn't detected. not only that, the camera was not detected either.. did I do something wrong?

Disregard the above, it worked in that it detected the two devices (daisy chained) - however the originaly problem still exists. When I hit play with external preview on, it goes back and forth between the camera's blue screen to the video =(

I will post pics

http://www.robertconti.com/temp/expre1.jpg

http://www.robertconti.com/temp/expre2.jpg

In that case, it sounds like you may need to totally separate firewire cards. Your camera is, apparently, not "playing nice" with the other devices. I've heard that Canon was especially prone to that problem. Daisy-chaining works fine with my deck but I haven't tried it with my camera.

The pictures indicate exactly what I expected to see and what happens when the firewire connection to the camera is broken for some reason. I've seen that same thing using a Canon XL1 but I wasn't using an external drive at that time.

I see...but wouldn't it make more sense to say that the hard drive was at fault? seeing as it's not giving any priority to it? hance the loss of signal?

off topic here, but why didn't my images embed with the vB code?

No, I'm betting on the camera instead of the hard drive. However, I can't swear it's not an interrupt conflict in the computer. There's really too many variables in this case.

As for the images, this board tries to keep things clean and fast loading. That means your images must be manually loaded separately if we want to see them.

so it doens't really appear that there's a fix in sight for using the firewire drive as the drive withmy media on it and be able to have the external preview too...?

Mike, it entirely depends on your system setup. I've got two fairly massive desk systems that won't allow me to daisy chain no matter what I do, and the system won't let me stack connections on one card, either. So on those two systems, I run two separate firewire cards.
Another option is to use a USB 2 drive, and use Firewire out for your monitor. PITA, but it works. Usually.
But with a second card, it's just a 20.00 investment to find out if that works.

This issue is one of the main reasons I'm using a Creative Labs Audigy as a sound card. It gives me a second firewire controller and output. I understand that it isn't a full speed 1394 port, but I've been previewing and capturing video with it while saving and editing the video on a stack of daisy chained firewire hard drives for several years now and it works great.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with capturing video. It has to do with using the external preview function IN Vegas 6.0 where the media being played is on a firewire drive connected to a 3 port firewire card. The video camera which goes out to the TV monitor is also connected to the firewire card. When I enable the external preview and hit play, the video becomes intermittent (on again, off again), there isn't a constant signal being sent to the camera while the hard drive is being accessed. Basically it goes from the video for a second or so, then to the standard no signal blue screen of the camera, back and forth like that...Does anyone have a fix for this or has encountered it before? The HD is a western digital 120GB, and I've tried the preview with two cameras, a Canon ZR20 and my Panasonic DVC80..

It's obviously some sort of issue about perhaps the firewire card not giving equal priority to the camera or something like that, not sure though...

If you transfer your file to an internal HD, disconnect the firewire HD, and play the file from your C drive, what happens?