1. Capture Now works best for footage shot in the middle of the tape. Do not use Capture Now if you’re anywhere near the end of the tape. If it hits the end of the tape before you stop the capture, the system will hang and you’ll be have to Force Quit FCP, manually restart the system, and clean up the unusable video files yourself.
2. Stripe the tape before recording.
3. If you’re going to be working near the end of a tape, log the clips, marking the last out point near the end of the tape, and batch capture.
4. If Capture Now hangs, your last capture will not be recoverable. For that reason, keep clips short. Keeping clips short will also speed up rendering time.
5. If Capture Now hangs, there will be unrecoverable files on that hard drive will take up the entire hard disk’s free space. You’ll have to go into the Capture Scratch folder on each hard drive and delete the folder corresponding to the project name.
6. Save a project name at the start.
7. If all your captures are hanging, uninstall Norton AntiVirus if you have it on your machine. If you don’t and you are capturing to hard disks scattered across two IDE interfaces of different speed, deselect the scratch disks on the secondary IDE interface and see if that helps.
8. Logging clips and then using Batch Capture seems to work great. I keep my clips to no more than 20 minutes long (and most of them are shorter) in case I need to render something in them later.
9. If you upgraded to Panther (Os 10.3) and find that capturing hangs where it didn't hang before, check the capture disk to see if Disk Journaling is on. If it is, turn it off! Here's how to disable disk journaling:
Go to Applications/ Utilities and launch Disk Utility.
Click on the name of the capture hard disk (for instance, "Macintosh HD".
Check the disk Format at the bottom of the window. If "(Journaled)" is present at the end of the format descripton [HFS Extended (Journaled)], the journaling is enabled.
With the hard disk name selected, Disable Journaling. You can use the Disk Utility menu(File/Disable Journaling) or a keystroke combo (Command-J). (NOTE: You can also use the Terminal to disable it as described in the below Apple Support article, though it was written for OS 10.2 Server.)
Close Disk Utility.
For what disk journaling is and does, see the following Apple Support Knowledge Base articles: (107249) Mac OS X: About Disk Journaling; (107248) Mac OS 10.2 Server: How to Journal a Volume or Repair a Journaled Volume (includes instructions about disabling journaling).
More to come...