This topic came up a few months back. Don't waste your money buying a so-called firewire to USB cable if it is just a cable with the correct plugs each end. It won't work bcause the protocols are incompatible.

Someone came up with a possible solution which involved a firewire PCMCIA card and a PCMCIA to USB adapter, but I forget the details, and I don't know if it worked.

Pure and simple as they say - GET to a firewire card somewhere. Forget the USB2.0 route!

This is why i keep my ancient 6 year old laptop around. It still uses my PCMCIA firewire card and talks to my scanner. When it dies, i'm gonna have to build a new "old" computer with all the old stuff on it, or move one of my video editing rigs to the other side of the lab.

I wouldn't be surprised if an old, used XP laptop with a PCMCIA slot could be picked up for under $100 some place these days. I got the PCMCIA two-port firewire card for it from NewEgg for $4, including free shipping. If you're doing a lot of DV it would be a handy investment.

They still sell firewire cards at Geeks for very little money......Whether they have regular PCI or only PCIe may be an issue for you, depending on your desktop.

These cards tend to work for tape transfer only if they have the TexasInstruments chip in them, but the last one I bought from Geeks did and it worked just fine for this very use.

I am keeping my old P4 desktop for this one reason alone: for capturing HDV.

This is interesting if your HDV camera has an HDMI output (my Sony HVR Z7U does):

http://blog.wossman.net/?p=263

It has the huge disadvantage of capturing the video as uncompressed though. :-(

To Laurence, the BlackMagic Shuttle has been around for a long time - goes with motherboards a gen or so back from today - but very problematic. Yes you could use it with HDMI - but the reality from BlackMagic is that it is literally configured to only give mildly compressed video capture to a system that has Premiere. In other words -reality only use with Premiere and specific hardware.

HDMI can be brought into a variety of devices (read expensive) but your workflows will be very very specific.

Interesting timing - I'm picking up my new i7 PC today, and I included a firewire card in the spec., as I occasionally use HDV and also an ADVC-300 converter for VHS ingestion, so firewire is still necessary.

....nor a slot to put one in.

How about the possiblitly of removing one of your cards, put a firewire card in that slot, and when you are done ingesting all those tapes .. switch back the cards.

My PC is a gaming one which does not have slots, the only one it has is occupied by the graphics card. I am inclined to believe that I need a different machine with a FireWire card. BTW, how about FireWire 800: can it be used to control/ capture DV/HDV.

RZ

Probably, but overkill.

Firewire 800 is a different physical plug.

Dave T2

Looks like you need to find a friend who has a firewire card and some free time.

Dave T2

Last summer i picked up a new laptop to bring to Europe where I was shooting a dance festival, only to find out it did not have a firewire port and had no way to download my FS4's. I finally borrowed another traveler's laptop for a couple of hours that had firewire, downloaded and then transferred the files to my external HD through USB2...

It is a pity though that with increasing computing power in even the off the shelf computers, they are crippled for lack of a FireWire port. I wonder what would the replacement be if we get rid of FireWire. What are the options for people like us with tape based acquisition.

RZ

Well, USB 3 is really better in every way aside from mini-dv and HDV capture. FireWire is going the way of eSata and SCSII: all great technologies for their time, but simply not current.

" My PC is a gaming one which does not have slots, the only one it has is occupied by the graphics card. I am inclined to believe that I need a different machine with a FireWire card. BTW, how about FireWire 800: can it be used to control/ capture DV/HDV."

I'm really curious what kind of PC this is. I have never seen a PC motherboard that does not have expansion slots..

You are saying you are using it as a workstation for working with Vegas, yet you describe it as a " gaming machine "..

There are still a lot of current generation PCs and Motherboards being sold with firewire ports..

Well, there really isn't an alternative as long as you keep your firewire cameras around. I do think that there would be a good market for an actual firewire-through-USB converter, a device that actually communicated through standard firewire protocol and let the PC talk to the converter over USB, but alas the manufacturers seem to be content to sell useless adapters rather than true converters. Another option is some of the outboard firewire drives that do direct capture from the camera and then offer some different ways to connect to the PC. Some of them have USB or e-sata connectors, but these are very pricey.

The real alternative is memory card based cameras. My firewire DV camcorder sits on the shelf gathering dust while i do almost all my shooting with an SD card AVCHD camera now. I shudder to think of all the time i used to waste doing real-time transfers from tape over a twitchy firewire cable. But, if you're not willing to give up your cameras then you're kinda stuck.

I have several tape cameras, which I'm basically keeping because it would hurt to take such a loss. My HVR-Z7U shoots to either tape or CF card and the tape was handy on a documentary trip to Africa last year. I would have spent hours transferring footage each night if I had used the card function. We came back with about 90 tapes after a month of shooting.

Stringer, most of the Dell workstations we have here in the office have only one slot, and most of us have used that slot for a dual-head video card. Several of the slim-line models have no slots at all.

"A lot" still sold with firewire ports? I don't think so. There may be models available but they tend to be in the much higher price range and not offered to the general public. The big issue is that most all off-the-shelf PCs have no indication as to whether they contain a firewire port or not, and since they were so ubiquitous 5 to 10 years ago most buyers aren't aware that they might not get one, so they don't bother to check before making the purchase.

Indeed, the current trend with most all laptop models is that USB is the *ONLY* peripheral connection and if you can't do it with USB, then you're out of luck.

Thanks for the info ..
I guess I'm out of touch with the off the shelf PCs and laptops..

I have been building my own for a while, and have had no trouble findinf motherboards with firewire..

"how about FireWire 800: can it be used to control/ capture DV/HDV"

Maybe, maybe not.
I have found that older Firewire 400 devices might not work e.g. VCRs of DSR 40 vintage. 1394b was supposed to be backwards compatible with 1394a. It seems this holds true for any 1394a device built after the 1394b spec came out.

Bob.