[MacDV] Re: Trying To Figure Out What to Buy

[Gerhard Kuhn]

On Friday, September 19, 2003, at 09:04AM, Frank Wiewandt <fwphoto at adelphia.net> wrote:

>> The one thing that may allow you to do everything via FireWire would be a
>> FireWire PC card.  By adding a separate FireWire card to your CardBus PC
>> (PCMCIA) slot, you'll essentially add an entirely separate FireWire bus,
>> thus eliminating contention on the built-in port.  So, you could connect
>> your drives to the PC card and connect your camera to the built-in port.
>> You may also be able to find FireWire 800 PC cards in the near future (just
>> speculating here -- I haven't even seen any FW800 PC cards announced yet).
>>
>> So...  You may want to give that a try.
>>
>> Anyone on the list have any experience with this type of setup?



I have two LaCie drives daisy chained to one of my iMac's firewire ports and I
DV camera to the end of that chain.  This setup captures DV reliably, when I connected the DV camera to the second port the capturing of video would stop after 30 seconds or less and I would get a slow drive error message.  Both drives are 7200 RPM drives so they should be plenty fast.  Switching the way the camera was connected has solved this.  I would think that a DVD-R burner would be less demanding in the chain since it requires a much lower data stream than a DV camera.  Now I would not recomend capturing video while burning a DVD but then you would not do that no matter what your setup was.

Gerhard