Monday, March 5, 2012

FireWire 400 Devices Incompatible with FireWire 800 Macs?

If anyone knows of a solution to this, it'd sure come in handy.... I'm dealing with several converters that turn analog audio/video signals into standard DV video. All of them use the FireWire 400 interface, as is traditional for DV devices. My problem is that my Mac, a Mac Pro (4,1), has FireWire 800 ports. I've bought two different FireWire 400-to-800 adapters, both of which make the DV encoder boxes visible to most video capture applications (QuickTime Pro and iMovie, but not to Apple's example code for performing QuickTime video capture on the modern Mac OS). However, in no case can I capture video. No preview of the video shows-up prior to initiating the capture, and clicking on "record" in QuickTime Pro or iMovie produces nothing (literally zero byte movies - no data whatsoever is captured).

I've Googled for answers, and found indications that other people have had the same, or similar, problems, but I haven't found any answers. (At this point, I'd even settle for an explanation of why Apple seems to have screwed me.) If anyone has any insights, please share.

2 comments:

  1. There are a number of people with problems connecting firewire devices to Macs, especially when going mixing 400 and 800 spec devices and ports.

    A few people seem to have luck by trying different ports on the same machine, or by going with an external FW hub or PCI card.

    http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/macpro/topic4472.html


    Apparently the bad old days of SCSI black magic are not entirely behind us.

    good luck!

    -johan

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  2. Anonymous2:56 PM CST

    Not an answer, but thank goodness you are back!

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