Trouble Capturing to Sony Vegas 8

[croonprince]

My external computer drive keeps going haywire! I'm using Sony Vegas pro 8. I just got a new mac which I'm running virtual windows on so I can keep editing on Sony Vegas. But I'm having a lot of issues. When I try to hook my camera up to capture footage - I get my image on webcam, not the camera I'm using to upload footage and there is this loud wonky sound over the speakers. The most disturbing part is I get a message saying my drive - which is 3 tb external drive - is corrupt and unusable. The problem might be from trying to capture data to drive that shares a data channel with the camera? Any ideas how to deal with this? Thanks!

[aedipuss]

most virtual machines can't access low level drivers and so you are probably not going to get vegas to see the cam. what kind of cam? DV HDV avchd? and how is the cam hooked up to both the mac and hard drive at the same time to "share data channels"?

[croonprince]

Thanks for your response. The camera is a Panasonic dvx100a standard definition mini dv. I'd been hooking it up direction to the external drive with a firewire 400 or 800 cable.

[aedipuss]

you could try connecting directly to the mac but i still don't think anything in the virtual machine will see the device. you could capture without vegas, but then you'll have the problem of converting apple .mov DVavi to pc DVavi. time to trade for a pc laptop if you aren't going to go over to the darkside and use fcp.

did you partition and format the drive to mac-os extended before trying to use it?

[croonprince]

The odd thing is that it worked a couple of times - i.e. I was able to capture some footage but then it went haywire - so not really sure what's going on. Yes, the drive is partitioned and formatted to mac os.

[aedipuss]

then try with the drive removed to see if it works again. the drive may have a bad firewire board. check the cables also, not all are high quality.

[croonprince]

Thanks again - I finally got it to capture. I have to reconfigure how I have the external drive configured and then I connected the camera right to the internal mac drive. Now I have another issue with editing on Vegas. I was editing some audio clips which I then rendered as mp3's. But when I go to play back the rendered clips they only show up as tiny blips (about 2 seconds). What happened to the rest of the audio? How and why did this happen? Thanks again for your help.
Dave