FCP 7, 'Capture Now' suddenly stops working

Question

FCP 7, 'Capture Now' suddenly stops working

I have been capturing footage from several tapes for many days now, with zero problems. I started doing some more today,

also with no problems, until about the 4th capture attempt. Suddenly, when I hit 'capture now' during playback, nothing at all

happens. I have more than 2TB of free space on my scratch disk, and no capture settings have been changed. I can control

the deck just fine, so communication between the deck and FCP is not an issue. But it literally went from being fine for one clip,

and completely non responsive for the next. I closed FCP, powered down the camera, re-seated the firewire cables, turned the

camera back on and re opened FCP. Same thing. 'Capture Now' doesn't do a thing. I have imported more than 15 tapes without

a single issue, now suddenly I am dead in the water. What am I missing?

I am using a Sony HC-1 with DV footage; Easy Setup set to DV NTSC, Device Control to Firewire NTSC. As I said, device

control works perfectly, but capture suddenly will not initiate. It's as if the 'capture now' button just went dead,

so to speak.

HELP!! 🙂

MacPro 2.26 Ghz Quad Core, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 16 GB RAM

Posted on Mar 3, 2013 3:34 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

David Harbsmeier

Level 7

30,089 points

Mar 4, 2013 3:07 AM in response to Ben Creighton

If you've eliminated all the other possibilities, you may need to trash FCP's preferences. You can do that using this app: http://www.digitalrebellion.com/prefman/

-DH

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Answer 2

Mar 19, 2013 5:25 PM in response to David Harbsmeier

Trashing preferences did the trick, and that app was great. So I was able to get up and running again and get a few more tapes imported. But NOW...

I put in another tape this afternoon, and now when I hit 'capture now' it appears to start the capture, goes for approx. 1 second, then stops and says "searching for media". Nothing I have tried solves this problem. I have powered everything down, unplugged/replugged everything, no help. SO frustrating!

'Lil help??

Ben

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Answer 3

Mar 21, 2013 6:55 PM in response to Ben Creighton

Okay, another development for me with this issue...

If I go into Audio/Video settings and change my capture setting to HDV - ProRes422, it works fine. So apparently

as long as I transcode the footage it's okay, but FCP won't let me 'capture now' with standard HDV settings.

So, half of my footage was successfully captured "normally", and the only way I seem to be able to capture the rest is by transcoding it. Now will the 2 variations get along on the same timeline?

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