Final Cut unable to initialize hdv deck

I thought I'd take a stab at this one, given the fact that I was experiencing a similar issue a little earlier today with my iMac and a Panasonic DVX100A camera.

Have you opened System Profiler to confirm whether or not your Mac sees anything connected to its firewire bus? Go to the Apple drop down menu at the top left of your screen>about this mac>more info>firewire. If you see red text indicating that nothing is connected, quit FCP and incorporate a POWERED firewire hub between your deck and your Mac. I use a 6-port Belkin model that's smaller than a pack of cigarettes. Plug in the hub, restart your Mac, then check System Profiler again. This time, it should see your deck. If so, you're on your way... (I'm just assuming that your easy setup preferences are what they need to be in FCP)

Hope this is helpful.

A Mac Honk said, check your easy set up settings, if you have deleted your pref's you will need to reset these.
Tony

You sure you haven't set the HDV deck to downconvert to SD? In that case, if FCP is expecting HDV it won't see the deck.

Which deck, BTW?

FCP sometimes does this with my Sony deck. This works almost every-time for me. Quit FCP. Make sure you deck is on and connected. Start playing a tape. Restart FCP. Open Log and capture. My deck almost always shows up.
--Bob

Hi - I was having precisely the same problem with a PAL digital video cassette camera (DVC) after using a NTSC HD card camera (Canon HF100) - it was teh settings - use easy setup to reset the settings in FCP.