USB Capture

[Dave McElderry]

I bet the Mac Books all have a firewire port

Is that because the Macs are more technical-oriented?

[Dave McElderry]

I use firewire to connect my two external drives .. but they also would connect thru USB. Is either one better for that purpose?

Firewire will give overall faster throughput that will become more evident in larger, sustained transfers (such as video capture). But it's nice to have USB available if you need to take the drive to another computer, since every computer since the TRS-80 has a USB port. Well, maybe almost.

[TonyP]

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. They are much appreciated as this is unfamiliar territory. It seems live video via USB has lots of issues associated with it. So my friend is looking for an older laptop that has a firewire connection. He'll use it to capture the video and then determine where he would like to edit, create the DVD file, and burn.

I'll stick to my desktop, which has a firewire port, because I like the larger monitor for editing.

This has been a very helpful forum. Thanks again for all the inputs.

[Jayell]

Firewire will give overall faster throughput

I thought so .. thanks Dave.

[Bob]

Dave is correct. USB 2.0 is 480 Mbps while Firewire is 400 Mbps, but the protocol for each is different. Firewire is much better at sustained throughput and better for connecting external drives. However, a number of inexpensive external drives use a combined internal firewire/usb hub which can negate that advantage by essentially using native USB and translating to Firewire. For those drives, it's even possible that USB will be faster.

While I was out doing my shopping this season, I noticed that virtually no one was selling tape based camcorders in the stores in my area. It was virtually all flash memory based camcorders and still cameras with video capability -- quite a difference from last year. Those same stores still sell them online though. USB is perfectily fine for these types of devices as all that is involved is a simple file transfer.

[Jayell]

Thanks for the additional info, Bob. How would I know if I have one of the combined units. Mine are both Seagates (200MB, 300 MB) with no model numbers to identify them. They both have 2 firewire/1 USB port.

[RJ Johnston]

If you camcorder has S-Video, then you could use something like these:

http://www.frys.com/product/4433916?sit ... IN_RSLT_PG
http://www.frys.com/product/5892113?sit ... IN_RSLT_PG
http://www.frys.com/product/5901074?sit ... IN_RSLT_PG

I capture with a similar device using Cyberlink's PowerProducer 8. That app has fast code and one of the few that won't deinterlace the video you capture. You can run into audio/video syncronization problems with these capture devices. I've been able to capture about an hour at a time without any noticable sync problems.