[1394] Re: Using La Cie external hard drive with DV cam and iMovie

[Jacob Alifrangis]

It's actually an incompatibility between apples firewire control code and
the canon DV control firmware. The canon cameras have an un-activated
feature which allows them to dump dv data onto harddrives directly. This
however is incompatible with devices that are being controlled by another
member of the firewire bus such as your pc or mac.



/*********************************
Jacob Alifrangis
Lead Developer and CEO
Braindonors.net / Shadowboxer.org
**********************************/

-----Original Message-----
From: Macintosh FireWire List [mailto:FireWire at lists.themacintoshguy.com] On
Behalf Of Michael Winter
Sent: Friday, September 12, 2003 7:20 AM
To: Macintosh FireWire List


On Thursday, September 11, 2003, at 05:08 PM, Jon Lucas wrote:

> I recently installed a 120GB La Cie firewire drive and tried using it 
> with
> a Canon DV cam running on the 2nd firewire port of my iMac via iMovie. 
> The
> captured video on the La Cie drive was choppy. Capture from the cam to
> iMac's internal hard drive was fine. Seems to be a function of the La 
> Cie
> drive. Anyone know what's going on?

A couple of questions. What kind of iMac and is it just the display 
that's choppy?

The reason I ask is when I used to use a 400 MHz iMac DV, the video 
often looked choppy simply because the iMac couldn't handle all the 
processes (capture, display, stream to disk). The result was that the 
display is choppy (the least important task during capture), and is 
most pronounced when using Firewire drives. However, the captured video 
is just fine. AFAIK if iMovie is going to miss any frames, it stops and 
gives an error message -you don't get files with missing frames.

So the bottom line is if the drive is too slow, iMovie will stop 
capturing and tell you its too slow. Otherwise the capture is just fine.

-Mike


----------
MacFireWireTalk list, a listserv for discussion of FireWire on Macintosh.
FAQ at <http://www.themacintoshguy.com/lists/FireWireFAQ.shtml>.

ADS Tech.| PYRO Drive Kit: convert your drive to firewire!
Dr. Bott | Now $169.00 <http://www.drbott.com/prod/ADS.html>

   Cyberian   | Support this list when you buy at Outpost.com!
   Outpost    |         http://www.themacintoshguy.com/outpost.shtml

FireWire | 2.5" and 3.5" FireWire hard disk enclosures
 Depot   | starting at $95!!  <http://www.fwdepot.com>