Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 9/10/2006, 8:50 AM
None. There is no difference. Once you have captured your video, you can edit it on any type of drive (USB, firewire, RAID, etc.) and the quality will be the same. At that point the video is just a file on your hard drive and any protocol will transfer it bit-for-bit with no loss in quality just as if it were a word processing file.

You can only potentially loose quality during capture and render.

~jr
Chienworks wrote on 9/10/2006, 1:11 PM
I'm not sure what you mean about "transmission into my computer". Are you asking about accessing the .avi files you've already captured or are you asking about connecting your camera to the computer to capture? If you're talking about capturing from the camera then there is only one choice: firewire. Even if your camera has a USB port, do NOT use it for capturing video. The file you get will be a very low bitrate "webcam" type video and will be very poor.

If you are talking about accessing the already captured files while editing then it makes no difference, as JohnnyRoy pointed out.

RAID is almost always an internal connection to fixed drives inside your computer. Firewire and USB are almost always external connections to removable drives outside your computer. It's very unlikely that you'll have a free choice between RAID and firewire/usb. They're not internchangable concepts.
farss wrote on 9/10/2006, 1:50 PM
Reading a lot of the buzz around these days one could easily get confused. Higher quality video than DV typically requires higher data rates and possibly RAID disks to keep up. The reverse doesn't apply though. Once the video is encoded in the camera the quality is set and hence the data rate required. The reverse doesn't apply, faster disks etc will not improve the quality of that video.
Zion wrote on 9/10/2006, 2:12 PM
Found This Article

Question: USB 2.0 is faster than FireWire...right?
Answer: No, actually FireWire is faster than USB 2.0.

Question: Hold on...USB 2.0 is a 480 Mbps interface and FireWire is a 400 Mbps interface, how can FireWire be faster?
Answer: Raw throughput rating numbers alone don't tell the whole story, as explained below.

The throughput numbers would lead you to believe that USB 2.0 provides better performance. But, differences in the architecture of the two interfaces have a huge impact on the actual sustained "real world" throughput. And for those seeking high-performance, sustained throughput is what it's all about (reading and writing files to an external hard drive for example).

Architecture - FireWire vs. USB 2.0

FireWire, built from the ground up for speed, uses a "Peer-to-Peer" architecture in which the peripherals are intelligent and can negotiate bus conflicts to determine which device can best control a data transfer


USB 2.0 uses a "Master-Slave" architecture in which the computer handles all arbitration functions and dictates data flow to, from and between the attached peripherals (adding additional system overhead and resulting in slower, less-efficient data flow control)

Performance Comparison - FireWire vs. USB 2.0
Read and write tests to the same IDE hard drive connected using FireWire and then USB 2.0 show:

Read Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 33% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 70% faster than USB 2.0

Write Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 16% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 48% faster than USB 2.0

FireWire - Still the Performance King!
As the performance comparison shown above confirms, FireWire remains the performance leader. And is the best choice for DV camcorders, digital audio and video devices, external hard drives, high-performance DVD burners and any other device that demands continuous high performance throughput.
tvgirl wrote on 9/10/2006, 3:43 PM
I'm talking about capturing and rendering.

Well, my small system here is being set up majorly on the cheap, which is why I'm using the firewire/USB 2/etc. for portability. I don't have my own tape deck yet -- I've had to use somebody else's. So I guess what I was wondering is will my video that's been captured, rendered or whatever going to look as good as if it were done with a system using RAID drives.
Chienworks wrote on 9/10/2006, 6:27 PM
As i said before, you *have* to capture with firewire. After that, the only difference you'll see whatsoever is how fast your video renders. Other than that the storage & transfer method you use cannot affect the quality of the video.