[MacDV] Re: Newbie stuff; external FW drives

[Michael Winter]

On Friday, July 25, 2003, at 11:10 AM, sb wrote:

> When connecting the camera, the computer, and the external FW drive, 
> make
> sure you are daisy chaining them. Computer to harddrive to camera.
> This is important on desktop machines, which have 2 FW ports.
> You only want to use one FW port when working with video editing
> applications.

Why is that? I've never had any problems using the two different ports 
on the desktop. I thought that was the preferred method since bandwidth 
is then split between two different busses. I know Firewire is a 
peer-to-peer protocol, but my impression (at least with iMovie) is the 
data is not going directly from the camera to the drive, but from the 
camera, to the computer, then to the drive. Am I wrong about that?

I know that even Firewire 400 is more than fast enough to handle two 
video streams, but doing it this way I've even been able to do large 
copy operations between my external FW drive and internal drive while 
I'm capturing video.

-Mike