Importing With The Sony VX1000 *Urgent*

So, i recently got a sony vx1000 from ebay. i already knew alot about so i did everything right when filming with the camera. i got home from filming some of my friends at the skatepark and plugged in my camera via firewire and used a firewire to thunderbolt adapter for my macbook air, lots of people use this method.

well, everything was hooked up good and the camera was in vcr mode. when i went to import the videos the screen was black and after about 4 seconds a message would come up saying *no data from device*.

I use final cut pro 10.2 and various other importing software, so i know it wasnt final cut that was the problem

i asked around and some people said it was the red sony tapes which were faulty and were bad production. (which is the one i use). others say it was to do with the camera being NTSC and my computer being PAL, or the camera being NTSC and the tapes being PAL

i wish i could solve this issue.

Please someone help

Cheers - Tobey.

Hi Tobey, the tapes are not set as specifically PAL or NTSC, they will record whatever your camera settings are.
Can you watch the footage back on the camera itself without it connected to the computer? E.g. does it play back through the viewfinder? The only time you will have a problem with the tapes is if it looks glitchy etc. that means you have dirty heads. I've never seen a dirty tape prevent a camera from playing back altogether.

Now I am not that familiar with Final Cut X but your project and capture settings should match the camera settings.

E.g. if you have a PAL camera, your project settings should be something like this:
Codec: PAL DV
Frame Size: 720x576
Pixel aspect ratio: 1.09 - 4:3
25i (25fps - frames per second, interlaced)

Otherwise if your project is set up for NTSC it will be looking for an NTSC source to be connected but you're trying to connect a PAL source - therefore you get an error.

Hope this helps, let me know how you go.

Hey, yeah it was working for a bit, i didn't know what it was. I come home on Friday to my computer not even recognising the vx1000 itself. All cables plugged in and it says DV and then some japanese letters on the camera in the viewfinder, don't know if that means anything.

Thanks

Are there settings or something? it was recognising it before but since i imported my first tape its not

It's not advised to captures tapes through the VX itself, it wears the heads out a lot faster, and they are expensive to replace. You should get a cheap dv cam off ebay to capture/watch back footage on if you want your VX to last.