Laptop recording

Wonderlick

Wonderlick

Member
I'd like to record from an HVX to laptop. Laptop has just one firewire port. Can I connect the camera to a firewire port and an external hard drive (firewire) to the pci slot providing I use an apaptor? I'd like to record to the external HD.
 
Yes you can record to a laptop and external drive combo. DV Rack HD is the best way to go IMO. It is Adobe software now.

DV Rack HD works great with USB 2.0 external drives, which is what I am using. The HVX connects to the laptop via firewire.
 
John Froton said:
Yes you can record to a laptop and external drive combo. DV Rack HD is the best way to go IMO. It is Adobe software now.

DV Rack HD works great with USB 2.0 external drives, which is what I am using. The HVX connects to the laptop via firewire.
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Thanks but I have a Firewire hard drive, not USB. I have one firewire input and two devices: camera and hard drive. Is there a solution? express slot/firewire adaptor?
 
If you have two available firewire ports on your laptop, you should be able to do it. One fw port for camera and one for the drive you are recording to. Seems like it would work, unless there is something I don't know.

You can get expresscard -->firewire adapters. they are probably 50 bucks on average.
 
Most FW drives (all I've ever worked with) have relay ports on them to chain more FW drives or devices. Just plug the FW drive into the machine and the camera into the FW drive's second port. I know it works with DV monitor pro on my Mac laptop.
 
Ming said:
Most FW drives (all I've ever worked with) have relay ports on them to chain more FW drives or devices. Just plug the FW drive into the machine and the camera into the FW drive's second port. I know it works with DV monitor pro on my Mac laptop.
Click to expand...

Do you mean put an adaptor that converts the single firewire port into multiple ports? The laptop only has ONE firewire port.
 
Using the camera and the firewire drive on the same firewire bus is asking for trouble. Robert Lane has some good posts on DVInfo about his experiences; if I remember correctly the summation was this: use two different firewire busses and all is happy. Use both devices on one bus, and you can have problems.

So yes, getting a PCMCIA or ExpressCard firewire bus would give you two busses and should make the experience completely reliable.
 
Wonderlick said:
Do you mean put an adaptor that converts the single firewire port into multiple ports? The laptop only has ONE firewire port.
Click to expand...
No, but that's in essence what the fw drive does. It has 2 or more fw ports on it. One goes to the computer the other is for whatever.

I've had problems with my G5 power mac dual 2ghz in the past using the camera and fw drives on the same fw bus, and eventually did get PCI express fw card.

But as I said on my Apple powerbook (g4 1ghz titanium)I have recorded to external fw drive from a DVX100 without problems. Admittedly though, I haven't recorded all that much using this method. Just a 15 minute test to be precise.

camera<-------->external fw HD port2
external fw HD port1<----->computer

What Barry suggests is

camera<-------->computer
external fw HD<--------->pcmcia fw card

which has the advantage of two separate busses

I'd try it without the extra card first as you already own all the gear and see how it works.
 
I've used a pass-through connection on a FW400 external drive to connect my HVX200 to a Toshiba P4M 1.5GHz laptop, and been able to record 720P DVCProHD to the external drive without any problems with DV Rack 2.0 HD.
 
Is an 8MB data buffer on an external drive (LaCie 500GB Extreme Firewire400/800 USB2 7200rpm 8MB d2) for direct 1080 HD capture on a laptop enough or is 16MB more advisable?
 
It doesn't make any difference. Even a 16MB buffer is tiny considering the data rates we are talking about.

DV Rack has a large (at least when compared to the capture modules in NLEs) buffer that it uses to deal with temporary I/O bottlenecks and for a pre-recording buffer. This buffer makes the buffer in the drive itself irrelevant.
 
thanks THoff. So to recap, A MacBook Pro, FCP 5.1.2/3, a 7200rpm 8MB d2 Lacie and an expresscard-FW 800 adaptor should do the job? directly capturing 1080i/p that is..
 
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