Pity the fool who must import ancient analog video in a digital world. In any event, that was my need so I attached my old Sony Digital8 camcorder to my MacBook Pro using the FireWire (iLink) cable. Fortunately my camera will pass analog video through the FireWire port but sans timecode.

By default, FCP provides for deck control when capturing footage via FireWire but that ability doesn’t allow me to capture analog video because FCP is expecting timecode when there is none (the hour:minute:second indicator does not replace traditional timecode in this case). This Catch-22 meant the Capture Now option won’t work because it expects to see timecode coming from the FireWire device.

After some searching I found a post on Digital Video Information Network that held the solution. In the capture settings, select “none” for device control. Leave everything else the same (i.e.: DV NTSC, 29.97 fps, etc.). At this point it was a matter of me pressing Play on my camera and clicking Capture Now.

I captured the entire two hours and will make subclips later. For this, I changed the maximum capture time from 30 minutes to 120 minutes so I could leave it alone to capture.

Related posts:

• Single FireWire bus on MacBook Pro and Mac Pro
• Final Cut Pro on a laptop with external drives
• Final Cut Pro cannot render video effects in certain ProRes (HD) sequences
• Final Cut Pro: why do people hate to document?
• From encrypted DVD to Final Cut Pro

Trackback URI | Comments RSS