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Capturing DV to a notebook without a Firewire port
Does anyone have a clever solution for capturing SD DV footage into a notebook that doesn’t have a Firewire port?
I’m running PP CS4 on this small machine. It only has 3 USB and one network port.
I want to get a bunch of older DV/DVCAM material captured. I’m using a Sony deck.
I found a very cheap ($3) cable that has a USB plug on one end, a 4-pin Firewire on the other end. But I can’t imagine this working, since there is no 1394 chip inside the notebook.
I do not need device control or batch capture. I can do it manually. But I want to get the footage in as DV and without going through any analog or other format conversions first.
Any ideas…? I’d be most grateful.
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2 Replies
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Get a cheap pc card (cardbus) firewire adapter. Most laptops, unless they’re super slim, will have a pc card slot and it should run you around $20-30.
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Thanks for the suggestion. I had thought about that, but unfortunately, this notebook only has an SD card slot. So I’m out of luck with that.
When I got this, the intention was to do much simpler work, and so I didn’t give a lot of thought to having multiple i/o options.
I do have Premiere 6.0 running on a much older desktop box, that has an added Firewire board that worked before with Premiere. Not now… I just tried it and for some strange reason, the audio is much lower in pitch and slower and out of sync with the video which plays at normal speed. I don’t have the time or patience to figure this out.
What I did find was a tiny (only 35k) little bare bones DV capture utility that does capture a usable file. It has no preview window or any other frills, so I’m logging on an external monitor and doing the this old fashioned way, clicking capture, and hitting the play button on the deck… and moving the clips over to the notebook with CS4.
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