Often you'll see both USB2 and Firewire ports on the same camcorder. Usually these camcorders shoot both still pictures and video and the USB2 connection is for downloading pictures while the Firewire port is for capturing video.

Exceptions to this are camcorders that use a hard disc or flash ram to capture both the video and still pictures. In this case you can tranfer video using USB2.

Firewire allows you to control your camera from the software (play, pause, ff, etc)

USB doesn't allow that, and I've never gotten USB to work well even just streaming video from the cam to the PC (except for a still picture camera)

Is it still relevant these days to insist on having a Texas Instruments chip on your Firewire card/port (inside your computer) to be sure to avoid problems ? Did other companies solved the problem since these years ?
Same for Oxford chip in external hard drives units ?

In the early days you had to watch what chip sets you used. More recently, pretty much all firewire ports work just fine. More important is that you are using a 7200 RPM drive and that there is some kind of active cooling.

USB doesn't allow that, and I've never gotten USB to work well even just streaming video from the cam to the PC (except for a still picture camera)

Just for the record, there is no reason this will not work. Panasonic camcorders allow full DV capture over USB, including camcorder control.

Unless you have a Panasonic you should stay with Firewire though. I don't know of any other camcorders that do this.

I can transfer footage from my CX7 with USB2, but I am copying the clips rather than "capturing" the video.

No doubt about it, firewire has always been the external port of choice for external storage connections needing ~30MBps of I/O. USB 2.0 has challenged this area with its improved thruflow rates(as of Win XP SP2). Unfortunately, firewire was an invention of MacIntosh, so there are licensing issues for Microsoft when it comes to firewire. USB is Microsofts answer to firewire. Because of the licensing issues, firewire doesn't really work properly with Microsoft XP SP2. There's a number of workarounds, but, problems with recognizing a firewire attached device, or even getting the right thruput speeds with firewire are common.

For my own experience, while I prefer firewire, USB has been flawless, works all the time, everytime. I always have to futz with the firewire connection to make it work and I won't even go into the problems with firewire800. My own preferences, these days, are for SATA II external storage devices. They're faster than either USB or firewire, more reliable.

I have had no problems with Firewire on my PC using XP SP2. But I do find that the firewire cards are not all the same.

Using USB can cause problems because it is Processor dependent. I can slow a USB transfer down real quick by running other applications at the same time. I would be real hesitant to try USB to capture video, knowing that anytime the PC has other chores, it could interfere with the capture.

Firewire is the better choice for video capture.

Dave T2

Sorry to say but I don't think any of this is correct. We have more issue with firewire devices and FCP users than PC users, especially with HDV decks and cameras. Part of that is probably because PC users are a bit more savvy technically but we have one HDV deck that works fine on PCs but every FCP user seems unable to get to work no matter how much hand holding we give them.

Apart from the HDV devices, some of the early VCRs used a chip that insists on having the buss to itself and some of the JVC gear by default runs a camera control protocol over 1394, hook that upto any computer with other device on the buss and all merry hell breaks loose.

Bottom line is 1394 can be as problematic on any platform. Once you know the tricks and what to watch out for you're sweet.

And speaking of firewire and XP, I wonder how many realise that with XP you can build a network over 1394, never really found much use for it personally but it's there.

Bob.

Bob....

I've played, briefly, with the firewire networking capabilities of Windoze XP. It's excruciatingly slow and, therefore, not useful for my purposes. I routinely disable the firewire network bus in XP.

I used to get capture conflicts if I didn't disable the network over firewire interface. Now, with Gigabit Ethernet, I don't have any desire to try networking over firewire.

My little Panasonic camera seemed to capture well enough over USB, but there was some now forgotten reason why I decided not to do it that way.

I largely keep firewire for camera and deck control, USB for sneakernet drives, and SATA2/eSATA for portables that I want more speed out of. Removable SATA2 is still a little flakey for me because my work and home computers are a little too old.

Rob Mack