What is the correct setup? and firewire800 flow through?
Using Genesis camera into Blackmagic card. FW800 Into Motu which connects to an external drive, daisy chained into FW800 port on Macbook pro. Is this correct?
My issue is that the Capture is fine but playback is sporadically playing with that digital colour breakup as if its damaged and the image is flashing on off on the hd monitors- but the recorded dvcpro hd 1280 1080 file is perfect and not corrupt. If i drag the quicktime file to the desktop it plays perfect and the problem is only experienced when playing off the fw800 external drive. It plays fine on the computer screen inside final cut and the problem is only seen sporadic on the hd monitor, Restarting the computer and motu often fix the issue but not always. It will work fine and then without warning it will breakup and play badly with no real regularity.
Also- the capture window seems to take a long time to open after waiting for a few minutes. Is anyone else experience these issues,
Re: Correct FW800 setup with macbook oro by Dave Roberts on Jul 13, 2009 at 1:16:27 pm
Seb,
Welcome!
The symptoms suggest that the Firewire bus is being overloaded. That is most likely because the bus is being shared by the V4HD and the playback drive.
The best solution is to connect the drive to the computer via a separate bus. You can do this by using a Firewire adapter card in the expansion slot of the MacBook Pro.
Re: Correct FW800 setup with macbook oro by sebastion reine on Jul 16, 2009 at 8:11:38 am
Thanks for your response.
Does anyone enjoy a trouble free motu experience. It seems very buggy to me and only restarts seem to fix the problem and sometimes its multiple restarts. I have these issues throughout every day and rarely have a trouble free day.
I changed the motu fw800 to fw400 and have experienced less problems but it has introduced new issues where the clip captured ends up looking as if its playing faster and it also plays with the audio wildly out of sync and then a section of black at the end of the clip with no picture or audio. If i look at the original quicktime movie in quicktime player it looks perfect but even after reimporting into FCP it still plays back disfigured. Again restart restart restart!
I believe it is the motu behaving badly and inconsistently and not the computer or my drives or my FW bus as I only use one fw port on my mac.
Thanks again
Seb
Re: Correct FW800 setup with macbook oro by Dave Roberts on Jul 17, 2009 at 3:38:18 pm
Seb,
The FW 400 and 800 ports on the MacBook Pro share the same bus. When a device is connected to the FW400 bus, the entire bus is restricted to FW400 speed.
Your symptoms still suggest to me that the Firewire bus is being overloaded. If you copy the clip to your internal drive and disconnect the FireWire hard drive from the computer, does the clip play back properly through the V4HD?
If so, you need to connect your external Firewire drive to a second Firewire bus on the computer. In order to create a second Firewire bus, you will need to get a Firewire adapter/expansion card. There are many brands to choose from and this is not an expensive part.
An alternative would be to use an ExpressCard eSATA drive (or RAID) solution.
If you would like to speak to someone at MOTU directly, please call 617 576 2760 and let the receptionist know you are calling for V4HD technical support. Either myself or another product specialist will be available.
Re: Correct FW800 setup with macbook oro by David Smith on Sep 18, 2009 at 4:49:10 pm
[sebastion reine]"Does anyone enjoy a trouble free motu experience"
Sorry to be late to the thread, but thought a response to this might be of interest to people reading the thread in the future.
I have logged many many days of trouble free recording using several V3 and then V4 units. When I do experience problems, they seem to come from dirty feeds (either video or timecode) which FCP does not react well to. Otherwise, problems seem to occur when I do something dumb or have a setting wrong.
I would concur with Dave Robert's suggestion. You are trying to do too much on the mac's ONE firewire buss. I use that buss only to connect to the V4 via FW800, and record to an external SATA II drive via an Expresscard to eSATA adaptor. In my experience, Firmtek makes the best card, probably because they have the most mac friendly driver design.
My recordings, in DVCProHD 1080i/60, are often several hours in length for a single clip, and the system never drops a frame (as long as the feeds are clean!)
Re: Correct FW800 setup with macbook oro by steve knattress on Aug 28, 2009 at 5:16:13 pm
I use my Motu 4VHD for SDI SD to FW800
Strangely I have "bandwidth" problems if I connect the MOTU to the added Express34 FW800 bus and the disc (Graid2) to the internal bus.
The other way around I can capture and record/replay 10 bit uncompressed without any problem, not sure why but it may be worth swapping your FW800 connections around.
