Troublesome Capturing Issue

[avidfilmmaker]

I have a majorly annoying issue concerning my capturing into Final Cut Pro.

I run FCP 6 on my Macbook Pro. I capture my footage from the tape deck directly to a 500GB firewire external hard drive. Currently the drive has a little over 300GB left. Everytime I capture, FCP only captures exactly 9:25:17 or 2GB of footage, before stopping the capture and telling me that it cannot continue due to lack of space.

I have gone under the SCRATCH DISKS tab in the System Settings and done everything from putting the "Min Allowable Free Space on Scratch Disk" to 0MB - 20GB and making sure the boxes under neath are unchecked- but it still only captures that exact amount of time and file size before stopping and giving me the insufficient space thing. Am I looking in the wrong place? I have no idea why it is doing this.

Can someone PLEASE help me out? I am trying to edit a wedding video and this is making it really difficult to capture everything into FCP and is going to be a major pain in the a$$ to edit.

 

[BenB]

Your external FW Drive must be a FAT32 format, which is a huge no-no on a Mac editing computer. Reformat it as Mac Extended, but NOT Journaled. On a video editing system, only the system drive should be Journaled. Non-system drives slow down too much to use Journaling on them. FAT32 formatted drives have a 2GB file limit to it.

Go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility. In that app, you'll highlight the drive in the left hand column. Then go to Erase, and for Volume Format, choose "Mac OS Extended", and give it a name. Then click the erase button. Should take only a very short time for it to run and reformat the drive to the proper format. Be aware this will delete any data on that drive, so back up any data you need before hand.

FCP won't let you edit well on a FAT32 drive anyway. Yuck, what an outdated format! The only thing FAT32 is good for anymore is small appliances (like the FS-100, Ki Pro, etc), and legacy Windows apps.

Second, do not let the deck and drive share the built-in FW ports, nor daisy chain them. Eventually you'll overload the bandwidth of the FW data buss inside the MBP, and have problems. You want to get a FW800 Express Card. A great one is the Express4 Terra Card by Wiebe Tech. Find it here-
http://www.wiebetech.com/products/TeraCard_Express34.php

This way, the Express Card data buss handles either the camera or FW800 drive. Leaving the FW data buss free to handle just the other.