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Dell Laptop for P2 Ingest – Firewire Port Unpredictable
We have been using a Dell D800 laptop in the field to ingest P2 cards and move the footage to an external firewire drive for mass storage. We then bring it home and edit on FCP. This system has worked quite well for 9 months.
We’ve had an interesting and painful turn with the Dell laptop. The firewire port has increasingly become highly unpredictable delivering speeds of either 28 MB/sec (acceptable) or roughly 1 MB/sec (terrible).
In response, we tried to clean up the system, upgrade this and that. Nothing worked, so we completely rebuilt the system. This included upgrading the BIOS, chipset, reformatting the system drive, reinstalling Windows, the works. We have not installed any other applications or drivers in the system at all (beyond the most up to date drivers for system resources and onboard devices). Even after all of this, the performance of the Firewire port is sluggish at best. We have tried using different firewire cables.
We cannot just throw a firewire card in the PCMCIA slot, because we’re using that slot to ingest P2 cards. We’re really dependent on the onboard Firewire port.
Any ideas or diagnoses?
Thanks,
ChrisAustin, Texas
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5 Replies
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Maybe I’m misinformed here, but I thought that you should use USB2 on a PC and firewire on a Mac for transfers?
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You are not misinformed. You are correct if you are referring to offloading directly from the camera. Howevere, our workflow demands that the cameras continue to work and we offload directly from the P2 cards loaded into the PCMCIA slot of the laptop. We use a total of 6 cards and 2 cameras.
Chris
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I’d say get a new laptop and see if it has the same issue.
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Interesting revelation… the Firewire port only performs unpredictably in a transfer between the P2 card and the external firewire drive. It does not perform poorly if the footage is first moved from the card to the internal laptop drive, and then from the internal drive to the external firewire drive.
Could this be a driver issue with the P2 card? Our HVX200s are from a very early batch, so maybe they came with early software discs? Is there a newer driver for the P2 card? If so, where can I find it?
If not a P2 driver issue, what about the card slot on the laptop?
I am most perplexed by the fact that this used to work well consistently and now it’s all over the board, even after a system rebuild.
Thnak you for your thoughts.
Chris
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The official diagnosis from Dell technical support is a bad motherboard on the laptop. No apparent relationship to P2 or drivers. Thank you all for your suggestions.
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