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PCI card
just bought a G4 powerbook on ebay (I know I’m behind the times, but if I had a million dollars, I’d be about $9,999,800 richer).
Problem is I can’t capture miniDV from a camcorder (Panasonic DVX). I originally thought that this was because of the 64 mb video card (built in), and that I would need to buy a PCI graphics card to boost video processing capacity.
Reading a couple of posts, it seems like this may be a problem of having the camcorder and hard drives both plugged into the same bus (ie, the FW 800 port that feeds the hard drives is runs on the same bus as the FW 400 port that connects to the camera), and that I could solve the problem by purchasing a PCI FW card (or eSATA card) and connecting the hard drives to this).
Does anyone have a recommendation? How can I figure out what is causing the dropped frames without having to buy two cards and trial and error?
Note that I don’t have this problem with other computers (a g4 tower, an imac and a g5 tower) that I had been borrowing here and there. -
2 Replies
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You should at least have some success digitizing. While you might have problems sometimes, you should be able to digitize from MiniDV with your system.
What are the specs on the powerbook?
Can you capture to the internal drive (just a couple of minutes as a test)?
-Russ
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I tried capturing directly to the internal hard disk, and didn’t have any problems, which leads me to believe that the problem is the bus, not the video processing capacity, and therefore the solution may be a PCI FireWire card.
thx for the help.
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