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Deck and drive firewire conflict all on same bus or no?
I’ve seen many a post about the FW400 & FW800 ports on my G5 all being on the same bus, and not being able to run a scratch drive to/from a DVCAM deck through both of those ports at the same time. However, through necessesity, I’m currently printing to video, the clips on the timeline are linked to the media files on the external drive (connected via the FW800 port), and I’m printing to my DSR20, which is connected via the FW400 port.
So far so good. My question is: There are many who insist that this won’t work. Is it something that either does work or doesn’t? (an on/off issue) Or is it something that will cause me a loss of quality in the video that I do print? I appreciate any input.
Nick
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4 Replies
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No loss of quality, it either drops frames, or doesn’t work at all… the FW bus shares both the 400 and 800 ports. It will slow down to the slowest connected device’s speed. If your FW drive is a fast one, it’s probably not going to cause any problems at all. I’ve done this a zillion times, and have never seen the problem raise it’s head, but also have very fast FW drives, so figure that’s the reason.
Jerry
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Who said that? I think you must’ve misunderstood. There is no problem outputting to the DSR-20 with your files on an externl FW drive. 800, 400, whatever. Same bus or different. You’re barely even tapping into the bandwidth of FW400. It’s a digitial transfer. Either it drops frames or it doesn’t. There won’t be any quality loss.
If you put a FW400 device in the FW800 chain it will dumb down the bus to FW400, but that’s not a problem for DV. You should be fine. Are you having a problem?
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No… I’m not having any problems with it – I just thought I had read lots of material about needing an extra firewire card. It apparently seems to be working fine though. Thanks for the answers!
Nick
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I guess I do read a lot about Looping a camera through the drive on a powerbook with only 1 FW port. That doesn’t seem to work well, and I’m sure the same holds for a deck. But putting them on separate ports is no problem. And the sharing of the bus is generally about the FW 800 bus getting bumped to FW400 speed when you hook up a fw 400 device.
FWIW I’ve looped cameras and decks through drives without trouble, but I never was doing long captures or printing to tape.
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