TOPIC:

Hi!
I'm on a mission to get 40-50 HDV tapes ingested.
I have a HDV1500A deck connected via FW400>FW800 to my MacPro. FCPX sees it fine.
I hit Play on the deck, hit Import in FCPX. Starts importing great! But as soon as there's a cut to a new shot (new TC) FCPX stops importing. This happens consistently at every single cut in the tape. I've read other posts of people saying that FCPX will SPLIT the file as soon as there's a TC change. I wish it were doing that for me, because in my case it literally aborts the whole import.

Seems like there's a 'scene detect' setting, but I don't see anything like that in the prefs.

Any idea what's going on?

p.s. this is just the latest hiccup in a long journey I've been on in trying to ingest these tapes, which you can read about over at videohelp.com: forum.videohelp.com/TBC-advice-for-HDV-tapes-HDV-tape-deck

Have you tried ingesting the tapes using QuickTime? It ignores the scene breaks.

Yes I've tried QT. It does indeed, but the output files have dropouts so whenever I try to transcode to proxy with Media Encoder it aborts. When I drop into Premiere it gives loads of dropout errors.

The clips that iMovie and FCPX are spitting out are instead dropout-free.

If you insist on going the laborious Firewire to camera to computer to software route forget FCP and use iMovie instead. It's more forgiving of the problems you're facing.

The smartest & most direct approach is ingest directly into a Ninja V and be done with it. We used to grab videos using Firestore FS5 DTE decks but even that added addition steps and time to the mix. The Ninja gave us a 1:1 play/capture result we could deliver immediately to the client without firing up FCP. (Still have four Firestore decks I'd like to get rid of if anyone's interested...)

Makes littles sense spending more time searching forums for solutions considering your workflow when all it takes going the Ninja style used here is a 1-2 minutes per tape administration penalty. (We could NEVER provide same day turnaround doing it your way.)

Thanks for the Ninja recco. That's HDMI right?

BTW I'm not insisting on anything. I posted the link to the other forum where you can see I actually started with an AJA SDI which was giving me issues. I was told by AJA support that a TBC would be the fix. When I went to videoforum to ask which TBC they'd recommend, I got a choir of people saying to go FW instead.

iMovie's capture is behaving exactly like FCPX: the import aborts at every TC change. At least some consistency. Which in my mind points me to think there's some scene-detection function going on which can't be overriden.

Either way I'm going to try a blackmagic ultrastudio hd, which is SDI.

Thanks for the tips anyway

Do you have transport controls from within FCP or iMovie (when connected via FW)? Have you verified that all of the settings on the deck are correct?

Which version of FCP are you trying to use? iMovie? macOS? QT Player? When recording in QuickTime Player, which quality setting did you use?

From reading your posts on the videohelp.com forum, it seems like you're jumping between different possible solution scenarios without a really good understanding of things. FYI, A TBC is for analog video. If you were using SDI out from the deck to an SDI input device conneccted to a computer, there is no way to use a TBC (nor a reason to do so, as everything is digital).

I've captured dozens of 20 year-old, or so, HDV tapes using iMovie or FCP in the past few years, from several cameras and a few different Sony decks. Things just worked.

Decks can be finicky. Sometimes, I've had to power up a deck, make the necessary settings changes, connect it to a powered-off Mac, then start up the Mac to get the HW connection and handshaking to work properly. In other cases, the connection to the computer and software on the computer were active before powering up the deck or camcorder.

Which model Mac Pro are you using? Why was it "flashed" and what does that mean, exactly? I'm not familiar with using Thunderbolt PCI cards in older Macs (didn't think that was possible, something maybe for a Windows machine only).

Were the tapes recorded on the same camcorder? Was the camcorder a Sony? I believe that the Sony HVR-1500A deck you are using only handles 1080i style HDV recorded tapes, not the later 1080p variants.

Sorry to hear you're having so much trouble with this...

P.S. - I have only used Apple's FW to TB2 and TB2 to TB3 adapters. I've heard that other adapters do not reliably work.

P.P.S. - I have heard that LifeFlix works with DV and HDV tape import, as well. www.lifeflix.com/