18 responses so far ↓

• 1 Ludvikfromparis // May 14, 2007 at 5:29 pm

  Hie, I am editing on FCP 4, on an old G4 (Procesor 1Ghz and 1,25 G RAM). I can capture material (DV CAM) on my internal Hard Drive and work well, but when I try to capture on my external Hard DRive (a Lacie 500 G with USB2) Final Cut just doesn’t respond. I tried to capture on my internal HD and then to copy the material on my external HD and then to import from this new place the rushes but it doesn’t work nether. It looks like my Mac is not enough powerfull.
  I guess that the problem is the USB 2 or the weak procesor…
  Otherwise, should I change some preferences?
  What do you think of that?
  (Sorry for my poor english)
  Ludvik

• 2 Andy Coon // May 14, 2007 at 11:46 pm

  Ludvik, your English can’t be any worse than mine and I live in an Enlish speaking country.

  Go into Applications/Utilities and open up System Profiler and check to see if your G4 has USB 2.0 or if it is regular USB 1.1 if so the speed is way to slow to capture the media you are capturing.

  If your computer does not have USB 2.0 you can always buy this… BELKIN Hi-Speed USB 2.0 5-Port PCI. Good luck. Hit me up and let me know if that is the problem.

• 3 Ludvikfromparis // May 15, 2007 at 4:39 am

  Hie,
  thank you for answering so quickly. I can’t see if my usb port is 1,1 or 2 but I guess it’s 1,1: look at what my profiler says:
  USB Bus:

  Vendor Name: Apple Computer, Inc.
  Product ID: 32773 ($8005)
  Speed: Up to 12 Mb/sec
  Bus Power (mA): 500

  LaCie Hard Drive USB:

  Capacity: 465.76 GB
  Removable Media: No
  Detachable Drive: Yes
  BSD Name: disk1
  Vendor Name: LaCie
  OS9 Drivers: No
  Product ID: 1873 ($751)
  Speed: Up to 12 Mb/sec
  Bus Power (mA): 500
  Serial Number: 1FF00E000D01F98E

• 4 Andy Coon // May 15, 2007 at 7:25 am

  Yup that is 1.1, i’m sure if you get the USB 2 card and install it everything will be fine.

• 5 Ludvikfromparis // May 15, 2007 at 8:38 am

  Well thanks, I’ll do that and tell you then.

• 6 Ludvikfromparis // May 25, 2007 at 1:37 pm

  Hie,
  I finally changed of HD, I took one with Firewire, it’s better than USB2 and its costs me the same to upgrade my HD than to buy an USB2 card. FCP works perfectly now.
  Thanks for your help

• 7 Final Cut Producer » Blog Archive » Email Question: How To Configure Final Cut Pro On A Laptop // May 27, 2007 at 3:22 pm

  [...] also suggest that you never daisy chain your external hard drives together. You can read an older post where I described my [...]

• 8 james // Aug 19, 2007 at 6:16 am

  hi
  i just got fcp 5 and i have previously been capturing my footage in imovie then transfering it to my lacie external.
  when i take the footage from my external to use with fcp i am droping frames when i edit simple stuff.
  i have a intel core duo imac (early 2006) with 512m ram and a lacie fire wire external.
  do you think that by giving my imac another 1gig ram it will fix the problem or is the problem that i am taking this footage of my external.
  any info would be great thanx
  james

• 9 kyle // Aug 22, 2007 at 5:18 pm

  Hi James,

  I don’t know a definitive answer to your question, but I’m sure that you’ll be much happier with FCP if you bump up your ram. I’d recommend getting 2GB instead of just 1GB. Memory’s pretty cheap right now (check dealram.com - I’ve had good results with OWC’s memory) and you’ll love the performance increase for FCP and just about anything else you do. Mac OS X doesn’t really do well until you have 1GB RAM anyways.

  Another thing that might be worth looking at - are you putting your lacie drive directly into a firewire port? If so, it should be fine (though some camcorders conflict with other firewire devices - I’ve been ok with my canon gl2 and xh-a1 in conjunction with an acomdata FW drive). But if your drive is hooked up to an external USB hub, for example, that might slow things down. Just something to look into.

  For what it’s worth, I’ve been able to capture and edit HDV footage using both a USB 2.0 (iomega) and FW (acomdata) external hard drive. Both are 7200RPM with 8MB cache, published ‘average seek time’ on the acomdata is 8.5ms. Not sure about the iomega.

  Best of luck!

• 10 james // Aug 23, 2007 at 7:21 am

  thanx kyle really appreciate the feedback
  as for my external it is connected straight into a firewire port and i had no problems with the footage when i was using it in imovie so i guess its not my external right??????
  i will take your advice and upgrade 2 2gig ram. i was looking at prices and i think ill be able to afford it so i might aswell.
  just 1 more question… sorry if i sound ignorant but i am new to editing and and im not to clued up on some things but you said that your external had a cache of 8mb what does this mean? and how does it affect editing..
  thanx again for your help

• 11 kyle // Aug 23, 2007 at 2:52 pm

  Hi James,

  If you’re going right into your computer’s firewire port, then it’s probably not your drive. As far as the drive’s cache is concerned, some hard drives come with 2MB caches, others with 8MB (possibly even more values there, I’ve only seen these two sizes). A bigger cache seems to correspond to better performance since the drive is able to store data coming in (in the cache - a piece of fast RAM, basically) while it’s being written to the drive - so it should make data writing faster. And that’s what you’re doing when you capture. Playback probably isn’t affected as much, but I just noticed a big overall improvement when I stopped using 2MB cache drives and went to drives with an 8MB cache. These specs aren’t always available, but google your drive model/manufacturer and you will probably find them.

  I’m assuming you have a 7200RPM drive. A 5400RPM drive may be too slow for DV/HDV editing.

  I’d like to believe that most 7200RPM external drives these days are sufficient for editing (I think they probably are), but I like to give my computer a bit of processing margin. On the other hand, while you can pay a lot more for much faster drives (RAIDs, etc.), it just doesn’t seem worth it unless you’re editing a feature-length film or something huge like that.

  I think you’ll like the memory increase. At the very least you’ll want 1GB instead of 512MB. OS X really doesn’t work well until you’ve got at least 1GB.

  One other thing I just remembered - in FCP, when you’re editing footage, it sometimes helps to adjust the RT (realtime) settings. They are found in several places, one of which is a little dropdown box near the upper left-hand corner of the timeline window. Check out the manual or search online for advice - I set my RT settings to be fairly conservative (so I have to render a lot), but I get good playback performance.

  Hope some of that helps!

  kyle

• 12 Paige // Aug 27, 2007 at 3:26 pm

  Hi!

  All summer I have been capturing video from minidv tapes to a lacie drive using fcp. Until recently, I was not having any problems. Now, however, I keep getting a file I/O error. Sometimes it happens within the first 6 minutes of capturing, sometimes not until much later. I have searched the web looking for possible reasons, but I really have not found anything. The strange thing is that I successfully captured about 90 tapes with no problems. I didn’t intentionally change any settings. The only difference that I can think of between the first 90 successfully captured tapes and the last 15 unsuccesfully captured tapes, is that the tapes I am now working with have been recorded on twice. I’m not sure if that would have anything to do with the problem. Any help would be much appreciated.

  Thanks,

  Paige

• 13 Ludvikfromparis // Oct 7, 2007 at 10:09 am

  Hie,
  how are you? I wrote to you a few monthes ago. I am right now another time in trouble with fcp!
  I am now editing on fcp 5.1 on mac osX.4.9
  I have shot in HDV (Sony ZE1) and captured on DV. I want to make a DV export only.
  I made splitscreens on my editing, several times. I did them by croping the images and moving them on the right or left. There are 3 images in splitscreens.
  I see them on the timeline but when I export on quicktime some of the images disappear. I check the renders and when I click all the render options, the images disappear in the timeline too (after rendering).
  I don’t use After effects so I’d like to stay using fcp for that splitscreens. Do you know what can be the problem (and the solution maybe,)?
  Thank you

• 14 ojah // Apr 27, 2008 at 12:36 am

  trying to capture video using fcp 4.5 but time code keeps getting off i think the capture scratch is not syncing well with my buffalo external drive

• 15 Richard // May 23, 2008 at 5:02 am

  I have Final Cut Pro,that i was working on ,it was fine and everything was working good.I restarted my computer.They it asked for a serial number.i wrote mines in it didn’t work it.So Now My Final Cut Pro doesn’t work. Help please. Thanks.

• 16 Nat // Jul 11, 2008 at 12:22 am

  Hi,

  I was just wondering, If you have a Macbook Pro with 5400 rpm internal Hard Drive, and you are using an external Hard Drive with 7200 rpm (with estata connection) as a scratch disk, will the performace suffer because of the slower rpm in the internal HD, even though you’re capturing and keeping your video files in the external HD?

• 17 Andy Coon // Jul 12, 2008 at 12:35 am

  Nat,

  It has nothing to do with your internal hard drive. Your logic board is being connected through your USB 2.0 or if you have an esata express card it connects directly to your logic board and that is where the information is being accessed.

• 18 DFagerstrom // Jul 13, 2008 at 4:21 pm

  Have you considered NVidia Mac AGP 7800GT?X, etc.
  Have heard good things about the product.
  In an old dual Opteron Tyan K8S2885, with PCI-x 133/64, that also has an AGP Pro slot where we recently
  installed an AGP Radion 2650. .
  Despite the demise of AGP, the 2650 has been on the
  market only a few months. I know other users have
  run Leopard on this kind of rig. We have run Windows 2003 Server.

Leave a Comment