MacBook - DV Camera and FW400 External HD

[chilipie]

Is it possible to import video from a Mini-DV camera to an external hard drive on a MacBook?

The hard drive in question is a Western Digital My Book Pro - it has 2 FW800 and 1 USB B port, but unfortunately only one FW400, so daisy-chaining seems to be out of the question.

Would a Firewire hub work, or would one port be unable to sustain the data transfer rate required?

 

[Makosuke]

I've done DV to FW400 capture without issues, although I admit it was with two ports.

Given that a DV stream is "only" about 4MB/s (32Mbit), you can probably just plug the drive into a USB port and capture that way. It should also (theoretically) work fine with a FW400 hub--there's plenty of bandwidth--and that may reduce the chance of dropped frames, although it could also cause issues because of reserved bandwidth or something.

Not really my area, and maybe somebody else has a better suggestion, but I'd just give USB2 a shot and see if it works to start with.

 

[chilipie]

I've done DV to FW400 capture without issues, although I admit it was with two ports.

Ditto, using my iMac - but the MacBook, which I'm planning on buying in the near future, only has one.

Not really my area, and maybe somebody else has a better suggestion, but I'd just give USB2 a shot and see if it works to start with.

I'll just have to try it out I suppose, but I'd like to know if anyone has done it specifically on a MacBook.

Thanks, Makosuke