capturing with a Canon XL2 camera

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capturing with a Canon XL2 camera

Hi guys,

I am on the road using my Mac Book Pro and a XL2 to digitize. When I go into log and capture, it will read the XL2 but the preview is still disabled, therefore, I cannot see the footage in my canvas, and it's not going down. Sometimes when I re-start everything, it will read it, but mostly it's a pain in the *** to get this to work. Does anyone have a solution to this problem. Again, after numerous re-starts, I can finally get it work.

Thanks!

MACBOOK PRO, Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Posted on Mar 21, 2007 10:34 AM

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Answer 1

Jbpitt54 Author

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Mar 21, 2007 10:45 AM in response to Jim Cookman

Well, yes, using a different cam would probably solve it but I don't have that luxury at the moment. What do you mean buy the cam and drive being on the same bus? Can I remedy that without changing devices?

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Answer 2

Jim Cookman

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Mar 21, 2007 11:05 AM in response to Jbpitt54

Well... it's never a good idea to record directly onto your system drive. Plenty of horror stories. If you get a firewire card for your card slot, you can run the camera into that and plug your drive into the built-in.

Canon's in particular do not play nice with other devices on the same bus. The card alleviates that.

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Answer 3

Jbpitt54 Author

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Mar 21, 2007 11:21 AM in response to Jim Cookman

Hi. Even though the cam is firewired into the computer, I've set my capture settings to my external LaCie hard drive, so nothing is going to the internal drive with all the applications. It's going down to the external drive.

But it sounds like I need a firewire card and this issue will be solved for good.
It's weird how I can restart it and sometimes get it to work.

Thanks for the info. I'm off to the Apple store now to make that purchase!

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Answer 4

Apr 2, 2007 8:02 PM in response to Jbpitt54

I think that Canon cameras compete with other firewire devices in such a way that on some occassions, if the camera captures the line (bus) first, it takes control and will work, but if the firewire HD takes control, then the camera can't be seen. The way I solved this problem was to place my hard drive on USB2 and use the firewire for the camera. It worked for me, it might just work for you.

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Answer 5

Jbpitt54 Author

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Apr 7, 2007 1:31 PM in response to Dcoffey2388

Hey thanks for that tip. I will try that too.

I bought a PCI express card firewire 800 card from SIGG so that I would have a second bus but it does not read my drive or camera. I've tried reloading it but it simply will not recognize the connection. My other 800 firewire is fine. But two at the same time are not working.

Any tips on that?

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Answer 6

Apr 7, 2007 2:43 PM in response to Jbpitt54

this happened to me various times when i upgraded to an HDV cam, the thing is that if you cant capture, either you have another aplication/hardware(in my case an analog to digital converter plug in to one of the firewire's) and you need to disconect it, or you can check that the sequence settings are for NTSC DV and on the easy setup check that its also to NTSC DV, sometimes its sets to custom and thats enough for it to say that the camera is conected and you can pres play and the timecode will start but there will be no video preview, thats what i do to solve the problem when it happens to me, hope this helps

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