oh no, no firewire

Ivan Lietaert wrote on 9/21/2007, 11:21 AM
A friend bought a minidv camcorder, not realising he needs a firewire port to transfer video to his portable. My first reaction was 'Oh no!', but a quick search on google produced this result: "Avoid cluttering your laptop bag with loose CardBus adapters and get all the high speed connectivity you need with this one Adaptec AUA-1422 DuoConnect for notebooks! With this Adaptec AUA-1422 you get USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394 FireWire ports in one card! Save money and avoid clutter by having just one card. For speed and ease-of-use you'll get where you want to go twice as fast with this Adapter AUA-1422 DuoConnect for Notebook CardBus adapter!"

It may well be that the speed of this card will be insuffucient for video transfer, resulting in lost frames or simple no transfer at all.

Does anybody know if this will work?

Comments

Eugenia wrote on 9/21/2007, 12:22 PM
Most PCMCIA cards that say that are USB 2.0 and Firewire, they will maintain the required speed, otherwise they can't get certification and use the logos. Some cheap asian cards might not care, but most manufacturers do.

BTW, make sure that the laptop does not have firewire. Laptops usually come with the mini-firewire port. A friend of mine bought a PCMCIA firewire card without realizing that his laptop already had one, it's just that it was the smaller kind.
Chienworks wrote on 9/21/2007, 2:15 PM
Cheap firewire is around 400Mbps. DV is about 30Mbps. There's a LOT of wiggle room there. Even if that card was only 1/12th the normal speed it would still be fast enough for capturing video.
4eyes wrote on 9/21/2007, 2:21 PM
I have been using an Adaptec FireConnect for Notebooks Model# AFW-1430 (IEEE 1394/FireWire CardBus). It's a Pcmcia card, works with DV no problem on a 2.8Ghz P4 HP Laptop. The internal harddisks are slow on the older laptops so you may need to capture to an external usb/firewire drive.

I can also capture HDV with this adapter but have to use HDVSplit and capture to the external usb disk with write-cache ON.

BTW- Firewire IEEE1394 is rated 400Mb/sec. Camcorders connect at 100Mb/sec and is called S-100. If you look in the technical spec's of a dv cam you should see S-100 listed as the connection speed. So your dv or hdv cam isn't transferring at 400Mbs, it can't, it's S-100 (100Mb/sec).

I thought Adaptec stopped making alot of their cards.
A problem with usb/firewire combo card is they do use a few more irq's (interrupts) then just a one protocol card. I would go just firewire only (my personnel choice).
Ivan Lietaert wrote on 9/24/2007, 12:31 PM
Eugenia, as a matter of fact, my friend mailed me that he had discovered a firewire port on his portable after all. You were right, again, so thanks!