How to Capture with no FireWire?

[BlueLaw]

Hi All,

I've inherited a beautiful 13inch unibody MacBook by Apple. As nice as it is, it has NO FireWire ports whatsoever. I'd really like to be able to sell my old iMac to my Mamma, and use only the laptop. But how can I capture my footage?

I'm using the DVX100 B
13 inch macbook, no FireWire ports...
Final Cut Pro, for Boys.

Any suggestions would be muchly appreciated.
Thanks

 

[BlueLaw]

Hmm it would be great if I could just capture the footage with a mini DV to USB cable.

 

[thome]

Sounds like a serious dilema...dont really know,maybe you should look for info from the Mac tech team on their web site or something,they might have an answer for you!!

 

[jpastuch]

Don't they have heavy duty external harddrives that have firewire plugins? Couldn't he connect the firewire to that, then the USB 2.0 through to his laptop? Or am I making all this up?

 

[Ric O'Shea]

I'm pretty sure you can daisy-chain a DVX => HDD => computer as long as all the connections are firewire. Pretty sure it takes firewire all the way for the capture to work properly. I'll be interested to hear what the solution to this is as the lack of firewire ports turned me off of the new macbooks. (So instead I bought a Mac Pro and have more than I know what to do with).

 

[David Jimerson]

Can't capture DV without Firewire. Can't capture straight to a standard hard drive, either; it needs to be an intelligent hard drive.

 

[lyrov]

Hello,

I have no idea even how a MacBook looks like but If it has a PCMCIA port you could use something like that http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ..._Combo_Firewire_USB_PCMCIA_Card.html#features

Thats just an example, never used this one myself, but I was using a similar one and capturing without problems to my old laptop...

 

[jpastuch]

What do you mean by intelligent harddrive? As in, internal? There are no external harddrives that this would work with?

 

[David Jimerson]

No, an intelligent hard drive would basically have its own computer controlling it. Something like a Firestore, though I'm not sure if you can use a Firestore to capture from tape. But you could use it to record while you shoot.

 

[ullanta]

The answer is basically that you can't capture using a MacBook with no FW. Trade the MacBook for something that either has FW or an expresscard slot that will let you use a FW card.... or get a supercheap used mac just for capturing, then transfer to the MacBook.

EDIT: Or, rather, keep your old iMac (I just saw that part)... you don't really want to be selling things to your Mamma? Buy her an iPod!