I'm having trouble capturing HDV 720p/30 footage from the HD100 to my Mac dual 1.8 using Avid 5.5.2. I've got 3.5 gigs, a radeon 9800 gfx, and LaCie firewire, and was able to successfully capture and edit one tape before problems set in. I've un/reinstalled the Avid software. The camera is hooked to a different firewire bus than the mojo, and I've tried capturuing with the mojo both un/plugged in. On the JVC side of things, I have the camera in VTR mde and the PB set to native (I tried 720 also. Same problem). Any other suggestions?

Here are some of the error messages that appear when the capture fails (usually after 20 seconds):

"Capture aborted due to lack of progress. The media captured to this point may be unuseable and/or incomplete"

"Exception: std::exception,what:[MainThread] Threads::SendMessageAndWait:No running trhead to receive message *PMDIO_IOManagerRep::IOThread PMDIOFormat Request Message"

Other messages that have appeared during capture:

Exception::Std::exception, what: “Bus error” in thread.

Exception. DIOProducer – unable to set blocksize

And on exiting, this comes up

“Bus error” in thread “MainThread”, at address oxbffff010

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, all. And thanks, too, for the incredible info throughout this forum. mm

If you can't get this to work, download DVHSCap and capture the .m2t files with that. They can be directly imported into Avid. I have both 5.5.2 and the HD100, but I use a DR-HD100 and import the .m2t files directly. I may give capturing a try.

Steve, thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try. The perplexing thing is that I now can't capture a tape that I successfully captured before, which makes me think some setting has changed. The camera format is HDV, and playback is set at 720p (native didn't work. I'm curious when you'd use native vs. the format you shot in?)

If you do go ahead and try capturing from the camera directly I'd be curious to know the results. Thanks, again. mm

If you can't get this to work, download DVHSCap and capture the .m2t files with that. They can be directly imported into Avid. I have both 5.5.2 and the HD100, but I use a DR-HD100 and import the .m2t files directly. I may give capturing a try.
If you go this route, would you maintain TC of the clips or is it all gone? I have done a short promo by going offline using the HD50 deck and its capability to downconvert HDV to SD but now I would surely like to go back and online the piece in HDV.

I am not actually sure if DVHSCap maintains timecode or not. I will try Avid and the Camera Capture tomorrow.

Steve, if you are successful capturing HDV 30p from the camera to the Avid, would you please give me details on the Avid capture settings and preferences. After dozens of systematic tests over the past few days I've pretty much exhausted all options I'm aware of; and yet, because I successfully captured one tape without a glitch (and with timecode) I know it can be done. Thanks, Utterly Perplexed

Michael J. Moore -

I ran a test and tried to capture on my G4 Laptop Running Avid Xpress Pro 5.5.2 and my Dell XPS Gen 5 Pentium 4 3.0 systems. Both have 2 Gigs of RAM.

G4 - I setup a HDV 30 Project and used the Capture presets. The only thing I had to do was let Avid auto-configure the deck because the HD100 wasn't registering. Avid set it as Generic DV Device. The capture worked fine.

Dell - Problems. It red the deck fine, but once the capture was finshed, the program crashed. There was some "Altercation" error or something to that affect. I am not sure if this was related to your problem or not.

I would suggest starting from stratch on a new project. Also make sure you start with a fresh tape logged since Avid sometimes can be bitchy if you don't name a new tape.

Suggestion if Avid fails - Get DVHSCap. I also captured with that and imported the .m2t directly into Avid to check timecode. It was one frame different. This seem to be the best solution for you.

Michael it definitely sounds like a hardware clash - make sure you only have one device on your firewire bus. Make sure you've deleted your site settings and user settings after installing new version. Make sure you are recording to the right drive. Delete the Media database and let the Avid recreate it. Make sure you have the latest version of Quicktime installed (7.x) If all else fails uninstall and re-install.

I'm not on the Mac - is the Radeon actually an approved card? I thought it was only NVidia Quadro series.