Help... Anyone ever used a USB-to-firewire converter?

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pcoyle83

New member
Hi all, just found the forum and I'm hoping you can help me with something. I hope this isn't posted in the wrong section. There seem to be a lot of knowledgable members here, and with any luck some of you may have some experience with this problem:

I have always edited on my home computer using Vegas, shooting with a DVX100 and then using a JVC GR-D20 to connect to the PC. I bought a new laptop recently, and it has no firewire port. No PCMCIA slot to add one either, so I'm a bit screwed there. It only has USB (2.0). The camcorder only has a Firewire port, nothing for USB.

However, I've found this adapter online: http://www.pixela-1.com/captycable/ And ebay has items from Hong Kong that appear to do the same thing, only much cheaper: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/USB-to-IEEE-1394-Firewire-Printer-6-Adapters-Travel-Kit_W0QQitemZ180049266807QQihZ008QQcategoryZ31493QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Other sites I've read have said that Firewire and USB are not compatible, so can't be converted/adapted to each other... My fear is spending the money on this converter and then it not working properly - I can live with the odd dropped frame (which I think might be unavoidable with the transfer rate difference), but I'd hate for the computer/Vegas to not recognise the camera at all or to capture only audio, or something to that effect...

Basically, what I'm asking is does anyone know if this kind of converter will actually work and enable me to connect the two devices which I thought were unconnectable?

I really appreciate any help you can give, and look forward to my time as a member here.
 
Yeah, but...

pcoyle83 said:
No PCMCIA slot
Click to expand...

This was why I became interested in this converter thing. I'm hoping that if they're selling it for upwards of $100 US dollars, they have integrated something there (maybe in the provided software) to make it compatible with NLE programs. But I'm prepared to have to just transfer everything onto my desktop PC, then onto the external HD, and work with that on the laptop.
 
If your laptop doesn't have a PCMCIA slot, then surely it has an ExpressCard slot? I don't think I've ever seen a laptop that didn't have any of the above (FW port, expresscard slot, or pcmcia slot). So you can get a firewire port expresscard and probably solve the problem that way.
 
It's not a HUGE problem... I'm going to be working from (and keeping everything on) the external hard drive anyway, so I can just use the desktop PC to put all the video on that - it just means I can't edit anything "on location". I was just hoping someone might have actual experience or have heard anything about it (or something similar) being tested. Thanks anyway, folks.
 
Well, you could still edit on a laptop, you just couldn't capture footage in or print back to tape. But if you use your desktop computer to do the capturing to an external USB hard disk, you could then edit the footage on the laptop using that external hard disk.
 
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