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Firewire video capture on a MAC

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Okay, my friend has a MAC, and wants to start mastering his own videos. Being a PC person, there are some questions I have, because his computer isn't doing a good job of it.

First of all, I forgot to write down the specific model, but his has a Large screen with USB anf Firewire ports lined up behind the screen on the right-hand side. Hopefully, this helps.

The details that I did remember to get are:

iMAC
OS X
PowerPC G5(3.0)
CPU 1.8 Ghz
Mem 256 MB
Bus Speed 600MHz
HD ST380013AS (74 GB)
Matshita DVD-R UJ-825

When capturing video through Firewire with iMovie, I can get it started, but the video is obviously skipping. It won't capture more than 20 seconds before stopping on it's own. It's also segmenting clips in the middle of a clip, which tells me that some skips are so large that the timebase function thinks a new clip has started.

Does the hardware of this computer have the necessary horsepower for decent capture? Is there anyway I can prioritize CPU processing for the iMovie program (diverting more resources to it.) Is there a setting to improve disc access? I've told him to bump up his RAM for video editing and such, but I don't know if more memory alone would help with the capture process.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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OK Mebe,

I capture mostly on a dual g5, heres what i suggest, up the ram, osx loves ram and 256 won't cut it for general use unless you like to wait and watch the spinning beach ball , the 1.8 g5 is more than enough for what you want to do, the issue here seems to be the disk space/read and write speed, I capture to a separate internal SATA 300g drive, capturing to the boot disc is a bad idea, its usually fragmented enough to affect performance in a situation like this, Tech tool pro or equivalent can do a good job of optimizing that though if you are limited to one drive.

What firewire device is your friend using? is it a canopus box affair or straight from dv cam? some canon cameras had problems with the firewire connection, heres a article on the affected models http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61603

As for CPU prioritizing, OSX does that fairly well but you can open Activity Monitor application found in the utilities folder to observe the cpu load and disk activity, you can also kill all processes there that might affect the capture process.

Does your friend have the file vault security option turned on? that will slow disc access, you can find that under apple, system preferences, security

Also which version of imovie are you using?

Thats about all i can think of at the moment, hope that helps
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