LAFCPUG: Log and Capture FAQs

From FAQwiki

I can't capture (or save) files over 2GBs

Q. I'm capturing video, but all my files are coming up as 2GB, and I'm getting weird file names with a long string of numbers attached to them / with the extension .av.

Most likely answer :

From Jude Cotter
A. Check the formatting of the drive you're capturing to. It is likely that it's misformatted. You must format a drive to Mac OS Extended before you use it for capturing.

To do this, open Disk Utility (Your main Hard Drive > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility) and select the name of the capture drive in the left hand panel. Click on the ‘Erase’ tab (don’t panic, this does not erase the drive, yet) and check that the volume format is Mac OS Extended. If it is not Mac OS Extended (preferably not ‘Journaled’) you will have to reformat the drive. This means erasing all the information that is currently on the drive. If this is what you want to do, just select the correct format and press Erase.

Other things that it could be:

• Early versions of Mac OS 9 did not recognise files larger than 2GB. If you need to stay in OS9, upgrade to 9.2.2 for access to larger files.
  
• Because some drive formats do not recognise files over 2GB, there is an option in FCP to break captured or exported files into 2GB chunks. It could be that you have this option enabled. In FCP go to System Settings > Scratch Disks > and make sure that ‘Limit Capture / Export File Segment Size’ is not ticked. Note that the default is 2000MB, or 2GB.