Cannon GL1 import mini-dv to external drive or FCP imac

When using an external HD you connect your camera normally to the Mac's FW socket.

Then in the preferences you choose the Scratch Disk which will be your external.

The video will then be captured on your external.

Incidentally, a USB 2.0 HD will work perfectly well unless you are doing extremely complex projects.

Use the normal cable to connect your camcorder to your Mac.

Then connect a USB 2.0 or FW drive to your Mac.

If your external HD has a FW socket you can connect your camera to that but it is not necessary and normally you should connect the camera directly to the Mac.

That's all.

usb drives are not recommended for fcp material. Although it may work, it may eventually come back to bite you. CAPTURING to a usb drive is particularly problematic as a dropped frame SHOULD cause the capture to abort. It is always a good idea to have "abort capture on dropped frames" enabled as if you capture without this enabled you will probably not be able to recapture with anything approaching frame accuracy.

FCP is a great program, but it's open nature allows you to work in ways that may not be recommended. Choosing to work in a way that is not reocmmended if you are knowledgable of the risks and downsides is fine. Recommending that someone who may not be experienced work this way is in my opinion not a good idea.

I have been using USB 2.0 HDs in preference to FW for the past 3 years and have had no problems whatsoever with DV, HDV, AVCHD, ProRes 422 and AIC.

Many of my friends can testify to the same experience.

Now that Thunderbolt drives are available, by using the same logic you could claim that FW is risky and not recommended.

Everything has its limitations if you push it far enough. As long as you are working within those limitations it does not matter.

I'm glad you haven't had any problems. Do a comparison of a file copy between even firewire 400 and usb2. I see a big dfiference. Granted, there can be a difference between brands of drives and 5400 rpm vs 7200 drives. My understanding is that apple's implementation of usb2 is not as good as that of windows machines.

In particular, capturing (as opposed to importing or log and transfer) is demanding of drive thruput. We still see many posts here of people having problems capturing successfully. I've always had firewire 800 cards installed on my macs so that I can have my deck and scratch disk on different firewire buses. I moved to ESata about 6 years ago and haven't looked back. And nowadays, it's only legacy projects that have tape based capturing.

USB2 is an interrupt-driven bus. As long as you restrict access to devices that are unlikely to generate spurious interrupts, you will likely be OK. This is often the default on a Mac being used as an NLE. The addition of a USB1 device or a USB2 device that normally generates random interrupts (many common peripherals are in this group) and you will frequently see problems.

The problem isn't in the bus speed, it's in the intrinsic sharing methodology. USB2 is actually faster (480 Mbps) than FW400 (400 Mbps) when inunterrupted, but FW is designed to facilitate large block transfers rather than multi-task between your printer, keyboard, and mouse. This is why there are no FW mice.

thanks for the technical explanation. Will using the mouse or keyboard cause problems while attempting to capture?

No absolutes on that, sort of like "will sprinting across the freeway get you killed?" In either case the "smart bet" is obvious... In his "USB One Minute Course, Jan Axelson states "Bulk transfers are the fastest on an otherwise idle bus but have no guaranteed timing."

Two things to remember here:

1.) Most computers have several USB controllers

2,) The offending device must be on the same bus.

I'm betting that Ian and his pals aren't printing tech manual pdfs on the same bus while capturing footage. Also note that DV, HDV, AVCHD, et al are not high bandwidth formats so are less risky.

IMHO, the place you're most likely to get burned is using a mouse and keyboard with your laptop while trying to capture to a USB drive. A laptop has fewer USB ports so the possibility of conflicts increases.

I can't recollect whether I've printed any manuals during capture but I would like to add that my 4 USB 2.0 HDs are all plugged into one USB socket on my 2008 iMac via a 7 outlet USB 2.0 Hub . . . . . which is yet another no-no as regards editing.

In my spare time I enjoy the odd round of Russian roulette. 😉

I've more or less stopped using FCS 3 now in favour of FCP X which is steadily improving and undoubtedly represents the future of editing.

I have only used USB 2.0 with my old 2006 intel iMac

I have been editing and captured with FCP 7 , DV, HDV, XDcam ProRes and I have had Zero problems with my 7 external USB 2.0 drives

Ian R. Brown wrote:

I can't recollect whether I've printed any manuals during capture but I would like to add that my 4 USB 2.0 HDs are all plugged into one USB socket on my 2008 iMac via a 7 outlet USB 2.0 Hub . . . . . which is yet another no-no as regards editing.

In my spare time I enjoy the odd round of Russian roulette. 😉

I've more or less stopped using FCS 3 now in favour of FCP X which is steadily improving and undoubtedly represents the future of editing.

I too have a long list of bad practices that I've observed or taken part in... but I usually don't recommend them to others. Most disasters are a combination of ingredients, so there are never any guarantees.

SATA drives are on the order of 4-5 times the speed of their "old school" PATA brethren so they can hide a lot of bad practice, especially if you're working with low-bandwidth codecs like DV and HDV.

Re: Russian roulette, does cutting a feature in uncompressed 720p from a RAID 0 without a back-up count? I've done it but wouldn't recommend it unless your normal weapon of choice is a .45 auto...

I tend to agree that FCP X is improving and is probably the new paradigm, but it doesn't yet support the type of work I've been doing. I use Color extensively and also have need to re-visit previous projects from time to time.

7toX supposedly allows you to rework FCP 7 projects in FCP X but I haven't tested it myself.

http://assistedediting.intelligentassistance.com/7toX/

Yes, it does... but it's a one-way trip. How does one get back for the color grading?

Philip did a fine job on 7toX, but one guy can only do so much.

I bought it when I had the 30 day trial of fcpx. Tried bringing over a few projects without any luck at all. I suppose you might have some luck if you massaged the project (the way you have to do to send a project to color) but didn't seem worth the effort.