Worse than that, more than half the laptops that do have firewire ports have ones with a chip set that will not capture HDV video! My HP wouldn't for instance. It would capture SD DV codec video and you could use it with firewire hard drives, but HDV video... no way, no how.

What you really need to do is to actually try to capture some video with it before you buy it. Trust me, most of them won't work.

As far as adding a firewire card, that doesn't always work either. The interrupts for the card slot are shared with a number of other things and the bus speed for the card slot isn't always the fastest.

Good luck.

Dang!

I was considering the Sony Vaio 17" (comes with firewire) until I saw it in person. It's HUGE and it weighs a ton : ( . Even as we speak I am checking out the Lenovo models to see if any come with firewire.

Good advice too on trying a capture first, Laurence.

Regards,

Kimberly

what's wrong with buying a pcmia firewire card?

i have two clients using (i think lenovo and asus) laptops with these cards with no problems....

what's wrong with buying a pcmia firewire card?

If I cannot find a laptop with built-in firewire, the PCMCIA card is my second choice. However I'm having a hard time finding laptops that come with PCMCIA slot too. Or if they are included, I'm not recognizing it based on the product description.

There are NO USB to Firewire solutions. HP laptops still have Firewire ports.

Here's an idea - buy an old Sony laptop with Firewire ports or use a desktop for your capture.

"As far as adding a firewire card, that doesn't always work either. The interrupts for the card slot are shared with a number of other things and the bus speed for the card slot isn't always the fastest."

Actually, Laurence - there are only 16 physical interrupts on the processor and all but INT0 are shared with a lot of peripherals.

+1 Be careful about the PCMCIA card.

I've had personal experience where older cards are not compatible with the newer laptops. I have a few good older PCMCIA Network cards i use for sniffing networks to diagnose problems, a CF PCMCIA card and SmartMedia PCMCIA card that do not work w/ my new i5 DELL laptop.

Funny this thread should come up because I just sent an email to some of my techie friends 2 days ago if they had any old PII or PIII laptops laying around they want to get rid of so I can load some old MIDI controller software and network sniffing tools and use these old PCMCIA cards on.

The best advice is what Laurence suggested, if possible, test the device before purchase or be sure you can return it if it doesn't work.

HP ProBook 6450b

Just a quick Google search revealed several other companies that still produce laptop/notebooks that have internal 1394 ports.

Given my experience with the firewire on my HP not capturing HDV video, I would be leery of that one as well. There are just a handful of laptops that still have 1394 ports built in, and of those that do, many won't capture HDV. They will capture DV and run hard drives, but not HDV video. They will control the transport, you just won't see anything in the preview window or the capture. Believe me when I tell you that I learned of this the hard way, and when I researched it, I found out I was far from alone.

The Lenovo W520 is now the frontrunner. It comes with firewire as well as an external screen plug-in for the multimedia projector that I use for showing the video. I almost forgot about that option. Thanks JR for the recommendation on Lenovo. I haven't carried a Thinkpad since my days in public accounting and that has been a while!

Regards,

Kimberly

You're welcome Kimberly. Some of my co-workers have the W520. It's a real workhorse which is what you would expect from a Thinkpad (even though IBM doesn't make them anymore)

~jr