OK, this is weird. Bought a spiffy new HVR-M15 HDV/DV/DVCAM player/recorder deck. Hooked it up to the Powerbook running FCP 5.0.4. And... well, something's not working. I can't capture video or print to tape. Yet, FCP recognizes the deck, can shuttle and jog the tape, shows time codes and alerts me when a new tape is inserted. Videowise, however, all I get is a screen of color bars on the log and capture window.

I would think there's some problem with the firewire video output, yet, I can connect my PD170 directly to the deck and dub tapes either way no problem. At the moment, I'm trying to capture and record DVCAM and DV video. I've adjusted the settings to ensure that downconverting is off and according to what I see on an external monitor, the video plays from the deck fine. Just won't flow via firewire into FCP. MY FCP settings remain the same as for usual DV capture. What gives? Am I doing something wrong? Is there a problem with the deck? Just seems weird I have device control of the deck, but can't see video, while my PD170 can see the video. Anyone got ideas? Thanks.

I have almost the exact set-up that you do. Under A/V, what do you have the capture preset and the device control set to? Also, do you know if the bars are coming from FCP or the M15? I assume they are from FCP.

Seems the problem was the deck was set to NTSC. I didn't realize it because when I put PAL tapes in the machine recognized them as such and played them properly. It even recorded PAL properly when connected to my PD170. But it was defaulting to NTSC when unthreaded and I think it must have been sending an NTSC signal when communicating with my Powerbook via firewire.

I hadn't seen it when looking through all the menus because you have to scroll down the OTHERS menu to find the NTSC/PAL setting. Changed it to 50i and now things work. I'll post an update if the problem returns, but fingers-crossed it is fixed! Thanks.