Sony Firewire

[John Rofrano]

[dean weily] ” the issue is we need to capture on location with a laptop that has only esata or usb. I am open to any suggestions, third party options”

Does the laptop have a PCMCIA or PC Card slot? If so, just buy a firewire card for it. Otherwise the laptop might as well be a brick. Never buy a laptop without firewire or an expansion slot if you are using it for video work.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dean Weily]

Unfortunately No, I had thought of that

[John Rofrano]

This has come up before and there is no way to capture via firewire unless you have a firewire port. Long ago there was a USB to firewire converter product but it is no longer being made probably because it never really worked well (firewire has higher throughput than USB and uses less CPU due to it’s onboard intelligence so it would be difficult to emulate something faster and smarter with something slower and dumber)

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Stephen Mann]

I can’t imagine how such a device could work. Firewire is a DMA data dump and USB is a handshake protocol.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Scott Francis]

All above are correct..unfortunately finding firewire and an expansion port is becoming harder on off the shelf laptops…. My suggestion is to fly in on a desktop, or buy an inexpensive older laptop on ebay and capture with that. I have 4 older laptops that I use to capture live video to HD and use tape as a backup. 3 of them are old Dell D505’s not good enough to edit or really watch HDV but can capture via firewire fine and that is all I ask of them…only use them for shoots….capture to 2.5″ external USB drives and take those back to the ranch, move data to my editing computers and done!!! Just a suggestion…it sucks that so many manufactures are not using firewire and expansion on laptops now days….oh well….good luck!

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[John Rofrano]

[Scott Francis] “it sucks that so many manufactures are not using firewire and expansion on laptops now days….oh well….good luck!”

Maybe not on “cheap” laptops but I got a Lenovo Thinkpad W500 a few months ago and it has a firewire port right on the front. It also has an Express Slot.

IMHO, the Thinkpad W Series is an nice rig for video work (Intel® Core™ i7 processor Extreme Edition (2.0GHz), 8GB total memory, 500 GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm, NVIDIA® Quadro® FX 880M with 1GB DDR3 discrete graphics, 15.6″ widescreen panel, 4 USB ports (1 USB 3.0), 1 USB/eSATA Combo, Powered USB, IEEE 1394a). I can highly recommend Lenovo, it’s the old IBM Thinkpad which is the industry benchmark.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dave Haynie]

Actually, Firewire and USB both use DMA in all modern implementation.

The problem and difference is simple. Firewire is a multi-mastered bus. When you have a video camera on Firewire, the camera itself initiates the transfer… it dumps video, and your PC responds. This allows the camera to be “camera-like”, and pretty much just treat the Firewire port as a digital version of a video port. It doesn’t have to get “computer-like” at all.

In the USB case, there’s a fixed master/slave (or the more politically correct host/client) architecture. The PC has to connect with the USB device, it has to initiate any transfers from the USB device (once initiated, the device can shoot the data to the PC, and the PC dumps that in memory via bus mastering, just as with USB). But the effect is that this is very computer-like… it just doesn’t work with continuous data supplied by an external device.

A USB to Firewire device is conceptually possible… I could build you one that works like a champ. But no one has, because it gets kind of expensive. You really need a full fledged Firewire device, a good deal of buffer memory, and a high speed USB device (USB at 480Mb/s will be fine against Firewire at 400Mb/s, as long as there’s enough buffering… camcorders generally run at 100Mb/s anyway). No one’s done a serious version of this, because it’s just way cheaper to add a real Firewire port. The few that have existed are kludges, and while I’ve seen and read about numerous units that don’t work, I have yet to hear about one done correctly.

-Dave

[Scott Francis]

Hey John,

By no means did I say they were not building them anymore….however in one trip to Staples, Best Buy, and Walmart I found no laptops with firewire and 2 with express slot. Some of my interns have also bought numerous one with i3 and i5 chips, again with no firewire or express slots…also looking on Tiger direct I can find only a handfull of them with either option…that is kind of what I meant by off the shelf…and if he didn’t want to buy another machine at a high price. I actually was luck enough to find one last year with firewire, express slot and esata….but it was the only one in the store….
I will have to keep the Lenova stuff in mind next time…thanks!!

Warmly

Scott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions

[Stephen Mann]

“USB to Firewire device is conceptually possible… I could build you one that works like a champ. But no one has, because it gets kind of expensive. You really need a full fledged Firewire device, a good deal of buffer memory, and a high speed USB device”

Yeah – like, a computer.

Like you say, it’s conceptually possible, but you would be reinventing the PC, and it would be cheaper to just buy a PC with Firewire in the first place.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Dave Haynie]

Well, yeah.. every Firewire device and every USB device contains a computer of some kind, even your keyboard or mouse. The big problem with a USB to Firewire bridge is that you’d need enough memory of some kind to buffer the video traffic. The Firewire side would be writing fairly continuously at 25Mb/s.. the USB side is going to be herky-jerky, as the PC gets around to requesting the next chunk of data from the USB device.

Also, you’d need a higher class of embedded CPU here, simply because Firewire chips typically come on PCI or ePCI buses (USB chips can, too, though there are also various embedded USB devices on simpler buses). It could probably be done in an FPGA… but that’s $25-$30 cost, just for that part (versus $1.00-2.00 or less for a typical CPU for most USB devices). By the time you’re done, it’s probably more than $100-$150 for a device that does this properly. And sure, if everyone needed one of these, they’d get fairly cheap in time. But in the quantities likely, typical users would better off with a cheap PC. Particularly because Firewire’s days seem to be numbered, ‘cept maybe in high-end audio work. No one’s going to worry about this in a fading market.

Same idea as a Flash or HDD storage unit… there are devices that’ll happily accept Firewire dumps and write them to Flash cards or HDD storage. But they’re in such low demand, and usually battery powered for field use (eg, so DV/HDV users can have their video immediately captured to disc, and use tape as a backup), that they’re far more expensive than a cheap PC and a $25 Firewire card. For example, you can find a bunch of Firewire to Compact Flash recorders at B&H, but they start at about $750.

-Dave