OT: FireWire disk and camera together?

Ptero wrote on 12/3/2005, 10:35 AM
I'm considering buying a 300Mb external (FireWire) hard drive to give me more room to hold video. I have a 4-port FireWire 400 card installed (specifically a StarTech PCI1394_4), so the hard drive would be on one port and my camera on another.

Here's the question: would the FireWire card be able to capture the camera data AND write it to the hard disk at the same time, or am I likely to have problems? If it might be a problem, what if the external disk was USB instead - would it be fast enough?

Comments

jrazz wrote on 12/3/2005, 10:53 AM
usb is too slow, usb 2.0 is fast in it's own right, but it is processor intensive and is not a good thing when your video editor (vegas) is processor intensive. I would stick with the firewire set up. if you find that it does cause problems, you can always purchase a seperate firewire card and install it so that way two pci ports are being used.

j razz
logiquem wrote on 12/3/2005, 12:05 PM
Buy a firewire/usb2 disk. When one connection is screwed, you can still save your life with the other. Also, Dv capture requirements are so low regarding modern Pcs standards that you can have no fear regarding USB2 cpu usage in the real word.

I do tapeless camera capture on USB2 disks since a long time and on an almost daily base and never had any complain with them. I had in fact much more trouble to capture via the same Firewire card. Perfectly unreliable method for me. So...
riredale wrote on 12/3/2005, 12:06 PM
Firewire 400 means 400 megabits per second, or theoretically 50 megaBYTES per second. Video over firewire is only about 5MB/sec, so there is tons of room to do multiple simultaneous transfers. I have a firewire PCM card in a slot of my Dell laptop that can handle both a camera capture and then writing to an external firewire disk at the same time.
Ptero wrote on 12/3/2005, 12:41 PM
The one I'm looking at has FireWire & USB2, so if I see problems on FireWire I can switch - but if the capture only uses 10% of the bandwidth I don't expect any such problems. As a last resort, I suppose I can always capture to the internal HDD then move it as a separate operation.

Thanks to everyone for the answers!
richard-courtney wrote on 12/3/2005, 4:58 PM
I was never able to just hook an external drive to a camera without buying
some device that could simulate a "recording deck" like the Sony DSR-DU1 or
a Laird DV3. Have I missed a simple method of capturing?

Are you capturing to your local hard drive then copying to the external drive?
jrazz wrote on 12/3/2005, 6:33 PM
I think what he is saying is that he has a firewire card hooked into his desktop and he wants to run the camera into the card and the External HD in/out of the same card, not hook the camera directly up to the External HD.

j razz
riredale wrote on 12/3/2005, 8:34 PM
RCourtney:

In my case, yes, I can do a sort of "direct to disk" by using a laptop with a capture program. I presume you can use VidCap for this, but I use ScenalyzerLive for my capture applications, and so I just plug both the external firewire drive and the firewire camcorder into a firewire card on my laptop, which is running ScenalyzerLive. Then I can capture directly to the external drive from the camera. Works great, but you're limited by the length of the firewire cables.
Ptero wrote on 12/3/2005, 11:05 PM
<blockquote>I think what he is saying is that he has a firewire card hooked into his desktop and he wants to run the camera into the card and the External HD in/out of the same card, not hook the camera directly up to the External HD.</blockquote>

Exactly the case - the cam and the disk would plug into separate ports on the firewire card. I'll be using Vegas' built-in capture application to stream the data into the system and out to the hard disk in much the same way as I do now with the internal IDE disk.