Final Cut Footage Problem - Help Please

Zillah

I am having some frustrating problems capturing video from my JVC GYHD111. Some help would be appreciated, I'm sick of trying to get it to work.

So we shot at 720p and (I think) 30FPS, which was recorded to a miniDV tape. We have a deck but the deck wouldn't read the tape, no biggie, we can run it from the camera. We connected the JVC to the Final Cut Mac by firewire and after a great deal of experimenting with settings finally got them to talk to each other properly, with deck control and the option to capture.

Here's where the real problems start. We have three tapes, each one with a small number of long takes, so there should only be two, maybe three time code breaks on each one. However, when we tried to bring them into Final Cut the final result was a huge pile of separate clips that were split up into clips of apparently arbitrary length, anywhere from 1 or 2 seconds to 3 or 4 minutes in length. I could live with that, but the worst problem is that there is approximately 6 seconds of missing footage between each clip, which basically means that the vast majority of the takes are ruined (these are interviews, the breaks often occur mid-response, so there is no way these are normal timecode breaks). In playback we didn't notice those problems so I have no reason to suspect the information on the tapes is bad, simply that it's not being taken into FCP properly.

So please, if someone with more experience with this sort of thing has any suggestions I would be very grateful.

ciencin

I had a similar problem with timecodes when trying to transfer mini dv tapes with FCP... never run into this problem in premiere though. If all else fails try to transfer on a pc, you could get lucky

Zillah

Why that never occured to me I don't know. Ugh. Thanks.