FireWire PCMCIA Card

dbarak

dbarak

Well-known member
Has anyone ever used a FireWire PCMCIA Card for working with DV (DV Rack, specifically) in a laptop that doesn't have a built-in FireWire port? Any thoughts on doing this?

Dave
 
Yes, my original laptop was a cheapie $499 CompUSA holiday-weekend special and it didn't have a firewire port at all. I got an external PCMCIA firewire card and it worked just fine -- used it to shoot about 600 gb of DV footage for a movie in fact.
 
Barry, did DV rack ever lag on that cheapie Compusa computer you used? And also, did you have the HDV Pack on that also, or was it just the DV Rack full version?
 
DV Rack would lag in finishing recording, sometimes for quite a while, but that seemed tied to the size of the project I was currently using. If I had several hundred clips in the DDR, then yes by the time I would cut recording it could take 10 or even 20 seconds for it to finish all that it was doing. I figured out that if I just ejected all those clips and kept the # of online clips down to a reasonable minimum, it performed fine.

That version was without the HDV PowerPack; I have the HDV PowerPack installed on my current laptop and it doesn't lag in any way. (Well, I mean, HDV is always lagging because the output from the firewire is 1/2 second delayed, but that's not DV Rack's fault, that's the nature of HDV.) But as far as performance goes it performs great.
 
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