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Old September 7th, 2005, 02:04 PM   #1
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odd camera/computer behaviour

Hi everyone,
I've been using Final Cut Pro for about a month now (switched for Premiere) and it's just awesome.
I do have a small issue however in terms of the computer (Dual G5) detecting my camera. The problem is that in order for the camera to be detected by FCP, I have to boot the computer with the camera on. If it gets turned off then I need to turn it on and restart again.
Is there something I can do about this or is it just a small bug I have to live with?
Thanks
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Old September 7th, 2005, 02:42 PM   #2
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If you have final cut 5.0...
just go to View>Refresh AV Devices.

But first make sure your firewire cable is connected and camera is turned on.
Should do the trick.
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Sony VX2100 cam; FCP 5.0.4
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Old September 7th, 2005, 03:57 PM   #3
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Is the camera a Canon perhaps? For some reason they tend to have a lot of issues with FCP. Do a search, or just browse through the Mac forum here for lots of discussion.

Also, have you seen the following? http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=49838
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Old September 7th, 2005, 06:27 PM   #4
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Actually, I should have been clearer - the camera is detected by FCP (it's controllable) but it gives me the dreaded "Preview Disabled" unless I boot with the camera turned on. And yes, it is a Canon - ZR-45. I shoot with an XL1 though and only use it to capture.
I tried the method mentioned in the link to get FCP to detect the camera - before I did that it wasn't detecting it at all, but it would be nice to be able to turn the camera on without having to reboot the whole computer.
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Old September 7th, 2005, 06:47 PM   #5
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I'm just not sure if there's a fix for this. There is something about Canon's implementation of ieee-1394 that doesn't seem to mix well with Apple's firewire. There have been a lot of posts on the topic here and elsewhere. For example:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=49843

If you have any luck solving the problem please let us know, I think a lot of people could benefit from your experience.
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Old September 7th, 2005, 08:23 PM   #6
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Well, the only way I've been able to solve it so far is to simply restart the computer with the camera on, so hopefully someone can benefit from that as a workaround. I was also having a problem with it not working when I connected my firewire 800 drive to the computer, so I currently use the firewire 400 on the front of the computer for the camera and plug the drive into a pci firewire 800 card and other than the restart issue, everything works very well.
I am hoping to find out why I need to restart to get fcp to detect the camera though, so I'll let everyone know if anything comes up.
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Old September 7th, 2005, 09:21 PM   #7
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I get exactly the same message with the XL2 (i.e. "Preview Disabled") but as soon as I send a motion command it disappears and video appears.
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Old September 8th, 2005, 09:08 AM   #8
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What do you mean by a motion command? Would that be like playing the tape, cause I tried that and it still says preview disabled.
By the way, I'm considering buying the XL2 for my job next summer - how is it with FCP? Does it have any audio sync issues like the XL1 does?
Thanks
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Old September 8th, 2005, 12:09 PM   #9
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Andrew,

Yes. Most of the time when I do this I hit the variable speed scan control to back up the tape a bit because I'm at the end of a recording and want to mark the "out" point for capture. Video immediately appears when I do this.

At the risk of violating the cross posting rule I'll mention that I just captured 22 minutes worth of XL2 audio/video with FCP5 and found them to be in a constant sync relationship througout the clip but offset from another by 2 frames. See my post in the Audio forum.
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