[pippiwong]

I have been having problems with FCP and my new 15" Powerbook. Since there is only one Firewire port, do people have problems daisy chaining their camcorder to the harddrive and getting drop frames during capture and playback? I am running the latest OS and the newest FCP 4.1.1. And when I try to playback the timeline to my external tv monitor through the camcorder (that is daisy chained into my drive), it keeps dropping frames and showing mosaics and fragments and blue screen. but i haven't had this problem using dv decks so i'm assuming it's my gl1 camcorder? does anyone else use a powerbook with a gl1 camcorder?

[tooki]

Why don't you get a FW800->FW400 cable so you can use both FireWire ports?

tooki

[pippiwong]

that's a good idea. but shouldn't daisy chaining be perfectly fine as well?

[nate_02]

I have had problems in the past with Final Cut and more than one Firewire device connected at a time. I called Apple about it and they said that Final Cut only supports one firewire device at a time (although you can usually get it working with more). I found that hard to believe since I thought that Firewire could have multiple devices connected at once.

Certain devices work together and others don't for me. I can usually capture from my DVCAM deck to my FW hard drive. My guess is that Final Cut doesn't like the combination of your camera and hard drive at the same time.

You could see if it works better without daisy-chaining by getting a FW hub or like Tooki said, get an 800 to 400 adapter

[acadian]

the only problem I had was when using "capture now". Now I just capture clips no more than 5 mins long.

[amazing]

Originally posted by pippiwong:
that's a good idea. but shouldn't daisy chaining be perfectly fine as well?

In theory, yes. The reality is sometimes different.

Anyway, here's a speed test that certainly off-topic, but it does show how FCP rendering performs on a variety of Macs, G5, PB 17", etc. If you need a laptop for FCP in the field, so be it.

http://www.barefeats.com/fcp4.html

[buddhabelly]

Originally posted by tooki:
Why don't you get a FW800->FW400 cable so you can use both FireWire ports?

tooki

Don't the FW800 and FW 400 share the same bus? So the same amount of info is passed through the bus regardless if they are daisychained or not.

I believe that FCP only supports 1 firewire device per bus.

I have zero problems with a FA Porsche Lacie (4200 rpm) drive and Canon DV camera connected to my one firewire port on my TiBook. I do start to get a few problems when I add an 828mkII interface.

[MountainMac]

I have also read of problems using FCP (or any other video editing software) with FireWire drives that have been formatted as HFS Extended (Journaled), i.e., dropped frames, etc. So if your FW drive is journaled, you should reformat as just HFS+.

MM

[Dave Hagan]

There could be a number of factors causing the problem. You should start by tossing out your Final Cut Pro Preferences file. This sometimes gets corrupted and causes headaches.