OT-Firewire 800 and HDV

vidiot57 wrote on 5/13/2005, 2:38 PM
Hello,

Kind of off topic, but not really as i am using Vegas 6 is my editing software of choice..I am using a pretty standard laptop (2.4ghz)for editing(thank God for Gearshift..!!!) and I am wondering if i were to get a Firewire 800 PCMIA card and a firewire 800 drive.. How much of a performance boost would you see?? Anyone working wiht one of these drives?

thanks,
Mike Moncrief

Comments

farss wrote on 5/13/2005, 3:08 PM
If you're trying to edit the m2t file then the data throughput is no worse than DV but the CPU load is huge so although getting a faster drive than the internal one (that's most likely 5400 RPM) will help it's not going to address the core issue. Using the CF DI seems the best way to fly for a realtime experience but then you do need a faster drive as you;re trading off CPU load against drive throughput.

Just be careful, I'm not hearing good news about firewire 800 and laptops, seems the PCMCIA cads aren't that effective, I've not had much luck with firewire 400 cards in my laptop either, the internal 1394 port is fine though.

Bob.

vidiot57 wrote on 5/13/2005, 3:42 PM
Hello,

Thanks for responding.. So if I am using Vegas 6, it would still be beneficial to use the Cineform Intermediate to be able to edit using the mpeg2 files??
Thanks,
Mike Moncrief
farss wrote on 5/13/2005, 4:13 PM
Vegas 6 includes the CF codecs so you can render out to that and edit using that. If you have GearShift you can edit a DV proxy very easily. I haven't tried the latter myself which is extremely slack of me.
Bob.
slacy wrote on 5/14/2005, 1:02 PM
Bob:

So if I recently bought a laptop with a non-PCMCIA firewire card already installed, I shouldn't necessarily encounter the issues you're speaking of?
farss wrote on 5/14/2005, 1:38 PM
Should work fine, I think the issues I've may be related to the PCMCIA interface in the laptop. Firewire and video push a lot of data through things so if anythings likely to break something that'll do it.
Also when you capture video there's no much room for error, the OS and the drivers don't have time to ask the device to resend data.
Bob.
DCV wrote on 5/14/2005, 1:59 PM

I'm currently using a HP zd7000 laptop with a Firewire 800 PCMCIA card hooked up to three Wiebetech Fire800 external HDs. The card has a TI chipset. The setup runs fantastic. Once I got XP SP2 patched up to fix problems with Delayed Write Errors, things have been very fast and reliable. Firewire 800 smokes, there is no doubt about it. Performance is indistinguishable from an internal IDE drive and in some cases faster because Firewire has such low CPU utilization.

As far as PCMCIA bandwidth is concerned, I wondered about it too when I was researching Firewire 800 solutions. PCMCIA has plenty of bandwidth since Cardbus currently runs at the same speed as PCI (33Mhz).

No problems here, I'm not looking back :)

John
vidiot57 wrote on 5/14/2005, 2:01 PM
Are you using the HP laptop and 800 firewire drives for HDV ? If so tell us more on the performance..

Thanks,
Mike Moncrief

DCV wrote on 5/14/2005, 3:19 PM

No, I'm not using them for HDV (yet). Capture wise there won't be any difference in performance because the datarate of HDV and standard DV are the same (25Mbps). As far as the captured files (M2T and Cineform) go I can only say that I've played with Cineform encoded stuff and the performance was fine. M2T is another story though because it's so processor intensive. Firewire 800 doesn't help much there.

John
kimgr wrote on 5/14/2005, 11:40 PM
John, what's the make and model of the Cardbus Firewire Card ?
I've been searching for a card with TI chipset, but so far I've only found 12 different models with NEC chipset, wich doesn't work with my Dell Inspiron...

Kim.
DCV wrote on 5/15/2005, 9:32 PM
Kimgr,

The Cardbus Firewire card can be found here.

I've been very happy with it.

John