need driver for Focus Enhancement mx-4dv

[NorthHill]

Hi! We recently upgraded to leopard and now imovie doesn't recognize our video mixer board. It's a Focus Enhancement mx-4dv. The firewire sees it as a Texas Instrument piece and the video comes in very pixellated. We've tried every combination of settings we can find in both the mixer and imac manuals. We've searched every site we can find but no luck on an updated driver. Does anyone have any other ideas or should we just remove leopard & the new imovie & go back to the old operating system?

Thanks much!

[SirDice]

Have you tried contacting the manufacturer?

[NorthHill]

Yes. Unfortunately, the mixer is about 6 years old & they don't support it any more. We're a school & we can't afford to buy a new one so I was hoping someone here would have an idea to make it work.

[trevor]

I don't think that you need a driver (or could even use a driver, if one existed) for the Focus MX-4DV. It outputs DV over FireWire, which iMovie (or any other video editor) should know how to accept without any additional driver.

What you need is to figure out why video is coming in pixelated, if it is. Is the incoming video SD (standard def) or HD (high def)? At what resolution is it? What are you displaying it on? Displaying SD on a computer screen often looks pixelated, just because the computer screen can show so much higher resolution than the source is capable of. Showing SD on a television screen looks normal.

Trevor

[Roach13]

Did you ever find a solution to this problem? I just bought an mxpro dv for it's ability to digitize directly to FCP but I can't get the computer to recognize it at all.

Macbook pro running snowleopard

[trevor]

Quote: Originally Posted by Roach13 Did you ever find a solution to this problem? I just bought an mxpro dv for it's ability to digitize directly to FCP but I can't get the computer to recognize it at all.

With the MX-4DV connected to your computer, open up System Profiler (from /Applications/Utilities). Now look under Hardware > FireWire. What devices do you see there? Copy/paste the information to this thread.

Are you testing this while other FireWire devices are connected? Or a FireWire hub? If so, you need to let us know the details like this.

If you don't see any device in System Profiler (in that case, you'll only see a message like, "FireWire Bus: Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec" with nothing further), then try a new FireWire cable.

Let us know the results of your tests.

Trevor