Q: FCPX skipping on tape import. Root cause analysis ?
Dear friends,
I have a Sony TRV-900E videocamera connected via FW800 to an iMac late 2009 with 16GB RAM, a 2,8 i7 quad core and a single original 1TB HDD with El Capitan.
When I import any of my miniDV tapes (which are from 2000 to 2012 approx and have been wound and rewound prior to capture and which have been mostly recorded in only one take on new Sony tapes and never reused) FCPX imports the footage in fragments of random size (from a few hundredK to 10-14MB) and frequently shows dropped frames and some audio distortion when imported into the timeline and replayed.
Tried creating archives first and then importing but the end result is the same.
What I cannot understand is that, at least seemingly, none of these "corruption" issues appears if I look/hear the tapes in the Sony videocamera itself !!!
I did try to use iMovie and same fragmentation occurs so I guess it's not related to FCPX sw itself.
Until now I was capturing on the iMac's 1TB HDD and now have tried to import on a 128GB SSD used in a USB enclosure (which is USB3 but if I'm not mistaken my iMacs USB ports are USB2). Same skipping occurs.
Maybe I need to setup the SSD in a different way and not only define it as the save directory for the imports?
If better ideas don't come to your mind the next tests I'll do are:
a) buy a NEW tape and try recording and importing from it. If this works it would indicate the older tapes are damaged but that would not explain why they seem good in the camera.
b) buy an head cleaning tape and carefully using it and see if the read/import would get better.
Thanks for any suggestions.
Message was edited by: robertfromroma. Added MacOS version. FCPX is 10.1
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.6), Late 2009, 16GB RAM, 2.8 GHz i7
Posted on Sep 30, 2016 5:40 AM