Imac, powermac, deck, external, best method???

L

Ldogg

Active member
The dilemna is, that I have a imac G5 that I ultimately want to do my editing on, however it does not have a fire wire 800 port on it. I recently bought a g4 powerbook that does have an fw800 bus on it. My deck is a DSR-11, and my external is a lacie 500gb d2 which I will eventually be daisy chaining to another 500gb d2.

Is the order of importing operations when using an external to go from deck to computer and then to external? If so, should I ride the fw 800 into my lap top and then use the fw800 to go from it to the lacie external. Then i would just mount my external to the g5 and bada bing bada boom correct? or is linking the external through fw400 going to be an issue? Oh and am going to have to basically import the drive footage into the fcp studio on my imac all over again? Or should I just skip the middle man and go from deck to g5 to external all via fw 400? I'm confused and very green!

Thanks!
 
You're likely to be limited to the slowest link in your chain.
A camera isn't as fast as your drive and a 400 fw should be able to keep up fine with the camera.
Officially Apple doesn't support Firewire drives since speed can be unreliable.
If you have footage on a drive you'll import the footage but won't have to recapture. Not quite as clean as having a log and the easy option of re-capturing if there was a need.
As always the best bet is to try the simplest and see if that works for your needs.
 
so are you saying it would be acceptable to route my footage from my sony dsr-11 deck via 400 fw into the imac. Then just make sure I save the files onto my external? It would keep up?

My goal is to do the batch lists through excell.
 
The problem with going to the hard drive is the fact that the video actually goes through the hard drive connector to the computer and then back out to the hard drive. It's this in and out on the single port that can cause problems.
Choice 1. Capture to Internal hard drive. Only FW connection is to the camera.
Choice 2. Additional FW card so hard drive is on one separate port and camera is on another. (On a Mac with multiple FW ports they usually internally are one port)
Choice 3 FW in 2 different ports (same internal port) One for HD and one for camera
Choice 4 FW from Cam into HD into computer.

Note that any/all of these can work depending on your machine and the rest of the system.
Turn off all other apps. Avoid recording 30-60 minutes all in one go.
Turn on prefs to watch for dropped frames. Do a check for long frames after capturing.
 
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