Many of you shooting with the JVC201 and 251 cameras have discovered that capturing the FCP is not always as easy as it should be. There appear to be a bunch of small idiosyncrasies between the JVCs and FCP that can lead to aborted captures or lack of camera connectivity.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post one thing to avoid is daisy chaining the JVC through your external hard drive. This works for other camera quite well bt causes issues with the JVC’s. So instead connect your hard drive via USB or Firewire800 leaving the Firewire port free on the computer itself.

We have now discovered another small issue that inhibits capture with FCP’s ‘capture no’ function but which is easily rectified. Once connected FCP often requires that you manually press play on the camera to get it rolling before hitting ‘capture now’. The issue is that both FCP and the JVC require a period of buffering so pressing Play on the camera and then straight away pressing NOW in FCP an often result in error as FCP tries to catch a datastream that isnt yet flowing.

The trick is once you have pressed play on the JVC to wait until the tape image appears on the FCP capture screen before you press Capture Now. This may be a good few seconds delay but this will help FCP catch the data stream from the camera correctly.

Thanks to Nicla for pointing this one out to me. Ive done a few tests now and it seems to resolve a few common issues.