Plug & Play problem

[Chris Soucy]

Been struggling with why this PC (and seemingly ONLY this PC) has this problem (on DVinfo anyway). The only thing I haven't seen mentioned to date (but may have been done anyway) is both the BIOS and the Motherboard Chipset drivers.

I can't believe Dell didn't run through this with you, John - but hey, I have to ask - did you download and update the latest BIOS and chipset drivers?

The former is not for the feint of heart but could really be at the root of this problem, the latter could be implicated as well.

It's a stab in the dark, but got to be worth a try.

CS

[John B. Nelson]

Chris, Dell had me update a chipset driver but no BIOS update. I did a system restore since then though, so I'm going to find and run that chipset update again.. but it still didn't help. I don't think there is an update for the BIOS but I will check for that also.

-John

[Mark Fry]

Hi John - did you ever get around your problem? I'm curious because I'm suffering something similar, but with XP.

TIA

[Chris Soucy]

Here we go again...........

Sit right down and tell us where it hurts...............



CS

[John B. Nelson]

Sorry to hear about your problem with XP. I still have not been able to do a direct firewire connection to my laptop. Still using the ADVC110 converter box as an "in between."

I'm kinda suspicious of my firewire plug on the laptop. That may or may not be the problem. I bought a Canon firewire cable for the purpose of connecting the A1 to the laptop which of course is not working... but I use a different firewire cable (heavier) to connect the ADVC110 to the laptop which does work. I wish I could swap cables to test it, but the Canon is 4 pin to 4 pin and the heavier one is 4 pin to 6 pin, so thats no good.

Everytime I go by a Radio Shack or Walmart I look for a 4 pin to 4 pin firewire cable but they don't seem to carry them. Guess I'll have to order one from Amazon or somewhere or maybe replace the firewire card on the laptop.

In the meantime I'm getting by with this setup.

-John

[Dan Wilder]

I've been fighting the same issues that many of you have with obtaining a reliable firewire connection with the A1. I use DV Rack (now Adobe OnLocation) for a lot of my work and though I've been able to get reliable connections with other cameras, connecting to the A1 seems to be truly problematic.

First off, a major source of problems, imho, is the crappy connectors we're forced to work with. Why camera makers continue to use the really awful 'standard' 4-wire connector is beyond me. Considering the limited options for logging A1 footage, you would think that they would have put more thought into such a critical component. But I digress...

In my attempts to get a reliable setup with the A1, I'm beginning to suspect that the particular firewire chipset involved plays a major factor. From the audio world, it seems somewhat well known that certain firewire chipsets work better than others when connecting multi-track audio interfaces to PC gear. It depends on the maker of the audio interface but I know, for example, that Presonus gear prefers TI firewire controllers along with VIA. Presonus doesn't support NEC chips. The embedded firewire controller on my desktop is NEC and it won't even recognize my Presonus gear so I use a PCI card with a TI chip and it works perfectly.

My laptop's embedded firewire port is TI but due to the 4-pin connector, I've been using a PC-card adapter with VIA and it's worked very reliably with all kinds of gear - at least until I got my A1.

If I fiddled around long enough with powering the A1 off and on and restarting Windows and pulling the firewire cable, I could get it to connect in HDV mode. Could not get it to work at all in DV mode. Nothing worse than having to record a live event and not knowing if your setup is going to work or not. Initially, I blamed Windows for the unreliability and figured it was just cruded up. After all, my h/w setup had been working well with other gear.

Last week I decided do a fresh install of Win-XP SP2 on the laptop and updated it all the latest patches. I could not get the A1 to come up on the VIA firewire adapter for nothing, even in HDV mode. Windows just simply refused to recognize it. So I tried my laptop's embeddeed TI adapter. Came up immediately in both HDV and DV modes! Yeah! Still don't like the 4-wire connector though.

I tracked down a PC-card adapter with a TI chipset and got it Tuesday. It's working great! As long as I can get a good connection at the camera, it comes up in Win-XP reliably. Yesterday I covered an all day event without a problem except once when I lost my connection at the 4-wire port on the A1. Grrrr! It must have caught me giving it a dirty look.

Sorry for the long post but I thought I'd pass on my experience and point out that when all else fails that there may be another factor biting you that is seldom mentioned in the video forums.

-Dan