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Firewire workaround

L

ljosaa

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 1, 2008
10
0
I just bought a new Macbook Pro but havent received it yet. The only back side to it is that I really wanted an extra firewire port be it 400 or 800 because Im planning on buying a Lacie external harddrive for video editing but how do I connect this if I also want to connect my firewire camera?

Do I connect the drive to the firewire input and get a USB to firewire thing for the camera or the other way around? Capturing through firewire while the drive is on USB would probably have some dropped frames or not?

And then I would connect the drive to firewire once capturing was over.

Whats the best and most effective way to do this?
 
You should be able to daisy chain the two devices. I would connect the HDD to the FW port then connect the camera to the HDD. Just make sure the HDD has the appropriate connections.
 
I was going to buy the LaCie external HDD that has both firewire 400/800 and USB but I didnt know that I could connect a camera with a firewire 400 to an external HDD? Is that really possible?
 
If you connect the camera and the HD via FireWire everything will be running at 400.

Get an eSATA card and an eSATA capable case, to gain some advantage so that the new MBP doesn't look like a hassle.
 
But if they are connected both of them via the 800 cable wont it still be more stable than if I had the HDD connected to USB and the camera to firewire? Even if it will be running at 400.
 
Why should it be more stable if both are connected via FW? You will also be sucking part of the limited 400 bandwidth available to the disk with the data from the camera.

And I said eSATA, not USB. That way you have enough bandwidth for a little array.
 
To the OP, I am in the same exact situation as you. I plan on doing what some of the other people here have said and purchasing a Firewire Expresscard for the slot. I think that is the best way.

Happy shooting! :)
 
If go the eSATA route, make sure that the card has port multiplier support.
 
Im going to buy an expresscard with firewire 400 inputs. They are pretty cheap and I think thats the way to go. Thanks for your input people here on my very first thread.

Ill be back, Im sure.
 
ljosaa said:
Im going to buy an expresscard with firewire 400 inputs. They are pretty cheap and I think thats the way to go. Thanks for your input people here on my very first thread.

Ill be back, Im sure.
Click to expand...

Here's a suggestion. Try daisychaining first if that doesn't work then buy the card. That way you'll save some money if you don't need the card. I'm not sure why there would be issues daisychaining. You're not going to saturate the FW 400 bus unless you're doing some serious data swapping. Even if you're importing video from the camera and directly writing that to the drive you're not even coming remotely close to saturation.
 
Not to hijack the thread. but how much Data on average is being transferred per second from a HD camera with MiniDV tapes?

And is there a way for me to record the data usage?

~Regards
Name101
 
Really that little?

I wonder why USB2 has such a hard time transferring that amount of data.. i used the same camera to transfer a movie with USB and the quality was shocking, droped frams and incomplete transfers of sound and frames.


Hmmm odd.
and with my previous question is there a application to measure the Data rate?
I know in Vista it tells you but OS X doesn't

Name101
 
Name101 said:
Really that little?

I wonder why USB2 has such a hard time transferring that amount of data.. i used the same camera to transfer a movie with USB and the quality was shocking, droped frams and incomplete transfers of sound and frames.
Click to expand...

You can't really compare FW to USB since they operate quite differently. Here's a link that may clear things up a little.

http://www.cwol.com/firewire/firewire-vs-usb.htm
 
I'm in a similar position having recently bought a MBP refurb. ( can't stand the super reflective screen on the new model + on a limited project budget ).
I've been reading quite a bit over at http://forums.creativecow.net/forum/gtech
Finding workable combinations of esata cards and drives seems a bit tricky.G-TECH seems to be one of the better solutions, although pricey.
You may find some help over at the creative cow forums.
Martin.
 
duffyanneal said:
You can't really compare FW to USB since they operate quite differently. Here's a link that may clear things up a little.

http://www.cwol.com/firewire/firewire-vs-usb.htm
Click to expand...

thanks for the link. Im aware that Firewire is asynchronous and USB is synchronous. I have seen some test results that even though it is capable of a therectical of 480Mbit/s the graphs show that USB only holds a sustained rate of 100Mbit/s which is much higher than the data transfer rate of the Mini DV. so then in theory the USB should be able to handle the transfer.

unless there is something else to the transfer.


moongravy said:
I would recommend daisy-chaining too.

MBBENCH can display disk transfer speeds.
Click to expand...

Cheers


I just did a test USB v FW400
Same Hard drive. WD passport hard drive w/ USB 2 and FW400

The USB was not that far behind FW400 and the transfer speed was still high.
 

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