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New to Mac – I’m sure this is easy…
I’m just getting myself up to speed on Final Cut Express on a Powerbook (g4, 1GHz, 1GB, platinum with OSX 10.3.9). My question is this – I want to digitize from a firewire camera to a firewire external drive. Can I do this? Is the FW800 chain on the same bus as the FW400 chain? Can I have 2 FW400 devices on the same chain at a time? Can I digitize to a USB2 drive (will it be fast enough)? What would you suggest? Thanks.
Wayne V. -
6 Replies
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The best solution is to get a firewire card to put in your laptop’s PC card slot if it has one. Belkin makes one called the “FireWire CardBus Adapter.” It’s on the Apple store’s web page.
In the past I had luck plugging a FW400 hard drive into a Powerbook and plugging a DV deck into the second port on the hard drive. It worked for me but others will tell you that you’re risking dropped frames. (Some people get firewire hubs which should pretty much be the same thing as what I did with the hard drive.)
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Forgot…
Stay away from USB2. Not at all good for video work.
I really don’t know if the FW800 and 400 ports share the same bus but I would suspect they do.
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They are on the same bus, which is why going to PCMICA card and using a different bus is the way to go to avoid dropping frames. For DV Firewire 400 has plenty of room as I believe DV is something like 100mbs… but you still have some people having issues.
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I had a sneaky suspicion that the 2 FW ports shared the same bus – that makes it almost useless for this application. I’ll look into the PCMCIA card. Thanks for the feedback.
Wayne -
Hi Wayne
I’ve a 866 mhz powerbook and several maxtor harddrives . I never had a dropframe when I only daisychained one drive and one camera to my powerbook.
And dv is only 25 Mbs so only 1/16 th of your bandwidth is used when your using firewire 400
Stay away from usb 2, thoughRene Hazekamp
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So one firewire 400 drive and one dv camera/deck will work? That’s great. Thanks.
Wayne
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