Firewire or USB 2.0?

[JDH]

Read somewhere that Firewire is actually better for downloading video from my Camcorder than USB 2.0, can anyone confirm that please? Bought myself an external hard drive with both but no firewire port on pc, so have also bought a Firewire card. Bit nervous about fitting the card, got to take the side off my tower

 

[John Armstrong]

IIRC Firewire allows streaming data, the USB only chunks of data. So the Firewire is the option for video downloading, usb for photo's.

 

[JDH]

Thank's John, much appreciated

JDH

 

[Fanum]

Just make sure you follow the instructions regarding earthing yourself to get rid of static John.....otherwise, it's a piece of pish.

If you can (ie if there are enough slots) stick the firewire card in as far away from everything else as you can to keep air flow good and the temp down....

B

 

[Womble]

You could get a card that supports both.

Here's a post from a few days ago where I gave some info about fitting a dual firewire and USB2 card. Please bear in mind that I've not used this card myself, so if it turns out to be cack, I'm sorry but not responsible!

 

[JDH]

Just make sure you follow the instructions regarding earthing yourself to get rid of static John.....otherwise, it's a piece of pish.

If you can (ie if there are enough slots) stick the firewire card in as far away from everything else as you can to keep air flow good and the temp down....

B

Good advice Bill, thanks for that You know what a natural I am with Computer thingys

John

 

[JDH]

You could get a card that supports both.

Here's a post from a few days ago where I gave some info about fitting a dual firewire and USB2 card. Please bear in mind that I've not used this card myself, so if it turns out to be cack, I'm sorry but not responsible!

I checked out that post TW, thanks for posting it up. More useful info.

I love this site (most of the time )

John

 

[andyclift]

I have been producing pro video on PC since the days of 1 GB drives and Windows 95 so hope the following is useful.

Firstly I have never come across a camcorder that supports video out via USB. Maybe they exist but I have only used pro and sem-pro kit and it is always Firewire. I have one Sony camcorder that has USB2 out BUT it will only output stills from a memory stick, for video it requires Firewire (or analogue component)

It is not a simple case of different ways to transfer files, both Firewire and USB2 are perfectly capable of handling the data flow required for DV quality video. Firewire is the preferred option however as it is not just for video/audio transfer, it also allows control of a camcorder from the PC.

On the surface this does not sound too interesting but video capture software normally allows you to save an edit list and then you can leave the PC to copy from the camcorder automatically.

-Plug camcorder into PC and run capture software.
- Use capture software camcorder controls to find first `in' point and store it
- Fast search to `out' point and store it.
- Repeat throughout tape.
- Click the batch capture option and have a coffee while the PC copies all the required parts to PC.
- You can have batches mixed over different tapes and the PC will prompt you to change tape.

Even if you just want to do a straight capture of a tape its easier to control the camcorder from the PC than use the cacorder's controls.

Note that all the above depends on having a `clean' time code on the tape. If you have removed/replaced a tape between recordings it will not work.

If you want to capture most of the tape and you are running the NTFS file system on a fast PC with lots of storage the above may not be needed.

If you are running the FAT32 file system the size of files is limited so here it is useful to split captures in 5-6 minute overlapping files which are spliced together during editing.

If your PC is a little slow, editing DV can be like watching paint dry (with HD editing even modern PCs struggle)so with the edit list you can capture at a very low resolution, edit with that and when you are happy just use the edit list to recapture at full resolution before making the final video.

It can be useful to save the batch capture file as if you have a corrupted video file or susyem crash it is easy to capture exactly the same bits again.

You also need Firewire to transfer the edit back to tape. Not so necessary today as dvd is the preferred medium but sometimes you may need a VHS copy. Easy if your PC has a video out card but if it doesn't and you have a camcorder that allows video in through Firewire (many do these days) you can use the `print to tape' option in the edit software. This will put your camcorder in `line in record' mode and copy the edit to a tape. Then you can plug the camcorder into a VHS recorder to copy to VHS tape. You get a bit of a quality loss but its pretty good.

I used to do all my work on tower PCs so additional hard drives were on IDE but today laptops are good enough and useful for on site work. Here I use USB2 external drives and it makes no difference whether you use Firewire or USB2 drives. USB2 is actually faster, cheaper and, I have found, more reliable. There is no problem mixing the two in the chain. For example. I capture from a Firewire conected camcorder straight on to an external drive connected with USB2. Works just as well in the other direction. Final edits on a USB2 external drive can be transferred onto a Firewire connected camera.