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Firewire transfer using PC
On a few occasions in the past I had tried transferring P2 footage from my HVX200 to my PC via Firewire. It has never worked. I have therefore used the USB 2.0 interface for the past year (and yes, I did try using the various Firewire modes from the camera’s menu).
However, USB 2.0 only gives me about a 15 MB/s transfer rate and considering the P2 card can supposedly transfer as fast as 80 MB/s, it really wastes a lot of time.
Anyway, I’m just wondering if anyone uses a Windows XP PC and is successfully using the Firewire interface with it. If so, then what did you do to achieve this and what transfer rates do you tend to get?
Thanks!
Brendan
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2 Replies
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This is not really an answer to your question but maybe an add-on. (wasn’t sure if i had to start a different post or stick with this since it’s around the same subject, sorry)
i remember loosely reading on the manual of the P2 that USB was only for PC and Firewire for Macs? If that’s true, is there any reason for that? (that would explain your problem)
And i think my question would be the other way around, could i use an USB with a Mac? We’ve got this camera with the busted Firewire plug and need to transfer some tapes (don’t have a deck or anything else)thanks
andrea
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Actually, I had read something about that at some point as well. However, I just don’t accept it. If both PCs and Macs have Firewire and USB then why should the camera care which computer it is connected to when it also has the same generic output jacks?
In addition, this only angers me in a way because Panasonic loves to always say how their P2 cards can transfer 80 MB/s. That means absolutely nothing if I am forced to use USB 2 where about the best I can get is about 15 MB/s (and by the way, 15 MB/s in their compressed format is about the equivalent of the real-time playback rate so it’s not like the camera itself actually needs that transfer speed to send it’s live compressed footage to the card). If you can only use Firewire on a Mac then this should be bluntly stated rather than finding out later. It makes a huge difference in transfer time.
Then again, this is also like Apple and their $800 raid card which has a cap of 320 MB/s when using expensive SAS drives in RAID configurations. Their card has no such cap with their SATA RAID configurations. My Dell workstation has no such imposed limitation other than the typical 3Gbps per channel, but I digress…
I searched around and it appears that Firewire transfers between the HVX-200 and a PC might be possible but it seems like it is just a hit and miss scenario depending on system patches, etc.
Again, anyone else had any experience with getting this to work on a PC?
Thanks,
Brendan
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