[jaquarat]

before i shot all my footage on dv tape, i first recorded on the tape from beginning to end with the lens cap on so i could lay down clean timecode. (did i do this correctly?) i'm using a relatively cheap consumer canon dv camera. then, i hooked the camera up to my powerbook, and logged all my clips in fcp hd - but when i attempted to capture all my clips to my external firewire hard drive using batch capture, i kept getting broken timecode on many clips. i'm wondering if this is due to my only having 512mb of ram in my powerbook, because it seems i was getting broken timecode at different spots on the tape inconsistently. if i bump my ram up to 1.5gb, will i have any better success?

or, if this is not a ram-based problem, what can i do in the worst case scenario to just get my footage into the computer?

also, does it matter whether i plug the camera into the hard drive and then into the powerbook (daisy chained) or just plug both the camera and the hard drive into the powerbook separately?

thanks!

[gautch]

i get this to when i turn off the camera and eject the tape, then reload the tape. Also if my battery dies while im recording. I pretty sure its not due to low ram. Your computer does not set the time code, your camera does. If your battery did not die, and you did not take the tape out and reload it, the id say somthing is wrong with your camera.

[jaquarat]

i think i figured out what was happening. i hooked the camera and my firewire hard drive (fw800) to separate firewire ports of a g5 tower, rewound the tape to the beginning, and hit 'capture now'. after a few moments, i got the dreaded "break in timecode" message - but what was highly interesting was that it came some time *after* i had gotten that same message while doing that same 'capture now' process on my powerbook. so then i set the g5's internal hard drive as my scratch disk, hit 'capture now' and...guess what? not one "break in timecode" message. smooth timecode from beginning to end. flawless capture. which suggests that it was a firewire bus bottleneck that was plaguing me. now, why this happened on my powerbook with only one firewire bus and no additional pci firewire card i can understand but...on a g5...and with fw800???

just don't get it.

(but at least i got my footage.)