FCP: Cannot Capture video to External Scratch disk!

What is your scratch disk? What type of connector? How is it formatted?

OK David, you linked her to her question on another forum, but didn't answer the question. That link didn't either, until I posted a response. (EDIT: Not to pat myself on the back or anything)

USB drives cannot be used as capture drives...period. They do not have the sustained throughput necessary for digital video. The external drive must be AT LEAST an external firewire 400 drive. FW 800, SATA Raid, Fibrechannel, ULTRA SCSI are all the better.

I just had the same problem last week trying to capture from a Canon Optura 200MC to a firewire external hard drive. Then I tried to capture using iMovie HD and it dropped frames. But when I just copy data to/from the firewire disk the Activity Monitor shows the transfer rate as 20-30 MB/sec. So the firewire drive seems to be working fine.

Then I later came across a thread in the iMovie HD discussion forum talking about some cameras not working properly to external drives and saw on a list of supported cameras that mine isn't listed ( http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/camcorders.html). But it is listed on the FCE HD list ( http://images.apple.com/finalcutexpress/pdf/FCE2.0.3_Qualified20050111.pdf).

Anyway, I then brought a USB2 external drive from work to test and both iMovie HD and FCE HD captured about 20 minutes of video to it without any problem. So perhaps your problem is the camera and capturing to a USB2 drive may work.

I see that Shane Ross says USB drives don't have the sustained throughput to be used for video capture. But when I did copying to/from the USB2 drive Activity Monitor showed the transfer rate as 15MB/sec, which is well above the 3.8MB/sec that dv uses. So I'm thinking a USB2 drive would be fine for a scratch disk for video capture. I've just ordered a 160GB one so I guess I'll know shortly.

Hope this helps.

Update on qualified devices: I just found the list of qualified devices for FCE HD ( http://images.apple.com/finalcutexpress/pdf/FinalCutExpress3.0_Qualified20051028.pdf) and the Canon Optura 200MC is NOT listed. Strange since it's on the list for FCE 2.03.

PowerMac G5/1.6 Mac OS X (10.4.2)

USB 2.0 has a peak transfer rate that seems attractive, but it does not have the consistant throughput rate that is necessary for day in day out editing. In most cases it simply does not do the job.

If it works for you, you may be in a class of 1. Congratulations.

The optura 200mc (as do MANY Canon cameras) does not play well with any other devices on the firewire bus and the longterm solution for this situation is to either:

1. get a PCI or PCMCIA card (depending on your computer) to isolate the camera from the drives
or
2. Get VTR/Camera that can play with the current firewire setup.

Cheers
x