Re: [PRODIG] Kodak Pro14N and Firewire

[matthew ward]

On Friday, January 9, 2004, at 07:29 AM, Jay Busse wrote:

With the current v. of Windows Camera Manager (3.2.0) you can unplug 
and replug
the FW cable without affecting Camera Manager. (Sadly not so with Mac 
v. 3.1,
though.)
<snip>
 But
you can yank the plug, turn the camera off and back on, and then 
replug, and
all's fine.
I can sometimes, not others.  I have seriously abused it to try and 
find out what is going on, pulled the firewire plug (both ends), pulled 
the battery out, pulled the mains lead, switched off the software etc.  
Mostly the camera happily reconnects itself.  sometimes you have to 
restart the software.  It does however seem to be very client aware, if 
you have one in the studio/location it instantly becomes incredibly 
temperamental and a butterfly's wing beat will destroy the firewire 
connection semi-permanently to permanently - 3 main boards to date.
To take some of the strain off the cheesy little 4 pin connnector, 
what about
finding an old flash bracket and cutting it down so there's a little 
stub
suppporting the cable and strapping it to that.
Because I want to attach it to a tripod? It has already been described 
as an amateur camera in a bath.  Do we really want to attach a soap 
dispenser/firewire holder? :-)
Or better still, forming a
little fork in the bracket to hold the body of the plug in towards the 
camera?
Well, whaddya expect for half the price!
Honesty and openness about issues with what could be a superb piece of 
kit, but do not get me started.
 I did have a problem a couple of weeks ago
where I dutifully connected and started the camera in proper order, 
but Cam Mgr
(3.1) would "find" the camera, but fail to start giving an error 
message. After
several tries, I pulled out the CF card, and it started fine. Card 
back in -
same problem. I reformatted the card in the camera and all was fine. 
The only
thing I can think of was I had taken the card out and used a USB 
Jumpshot cable
to download some files to the laptop, but didn't delete any or modify 
the card
in any way, as far as I can remember.
This is a known problem, if there is anything on the card not produced 
by the camera, it destroys the firewire connection in OS X.  Not in OS 
9.  Not in Windows. Go figure.

Matthew ward

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