Fire wire error

[Monty Rakusen]

Hi

I got my old 39 mk1 out of the box, its my spare camera now I shoot with the 50 and it cant have shot more than 200 frames in a whole year since it had its fire wire port repaired. I got it out of the box because I'm converting a lighting boom into a camera crane to do some overhead shots of people working on jet engines..like you do. I'm just testing and didn't fancy having the 50 crash to the ground. Phocus 2.5.2.

Anyway I do know that you need to let the camera take a charge for a while and I then used a 10m FW800 to a Lindy booster cable run out of the i7 macpro. I got a few shots and then I got Firewire error. Then I left it for a while longer and tried again and then I went to Live view to focus from the laptop and then I got a firewire error. Then I changed the fire wire cable for my regularly used FW800 5m and tried again, got a few more shots and then Live view and it crashed again. Changed the battery. Tried again, seem like Live view is crashing it or the cable is faulty. Got my old Granite Digital bomb proof cable out....can't get it to go faulty at all! Tested my regular cable on my 50 and it works fine.

So what do you think, is it my cable or was it not taking a charge because the 10m is too long? Or have I got a camera fault?

Mysterious.

Monty Rakusen

[grandguru]

Here is a quote (slightly out of context) regarding cable length from the Wikipedia article about firewire. Please see the whole article to see what can and cant be done with firewire.

Cable length is limited to 4.5 metres (14.8 ft), although up to 16 cables can be daisy chained using active repeaters; external hubs, or internal hubs are often present in FireWire equipment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewire