Video capture to external FW drive?

[idebb]

Is this possible with a DV camera and FW drive both connected to the same LaCie firewire 800 card on a T60?

Thanks!

[RonS]

Sure - no problem

[idebb]

Good to know!


Also... is there a way to get two independant firewirebuses, one for my RME Fireface400 soundcard and one for my firewiredrive with disk streaming samples?

I´m thinking one Lacie 800 pcmcia and one Siig pcexpress 800 at the same time.

I probably need a thinner pcmcia card for this right? Because of the big bump sticking out of the Lacie making the Siig not fit. Am I right?

[RonS]

I think you're talking about the Siig ExpressCard 54 Firewire card, right? If so, then I think you're correct - they both won't fit. I haven't tried this myself. It would have been nice if Lenovo made one of them upside down to eliminate this problem.

You still have options:

1. Get a PCMCIA extender board Since the PCMCIA is on the bottom, it will clear the bulge of the ExpressCard
2. Get an Advanced Dock and put a PCI-Express Firewire card in there. You may not get ideal performance, but probably more than enough bandwidth for sound.
3. Get a USB to Firewire cable. I've never used one of these, but check out usbfirewire.com

[idebb]

Siig FW expresscard/54 with two ports.. yes thats the one. The smaller one port expresscard/34 doesn´t seem to fit either since no matter what the LaCie PCMCIA in the bottom sticks out to much. Thanks for info!


Maybe if I get this one...
http://www.welovemacs.com/adp-fw-200.html

It seems ALOT thinner but it says something about a dongle. English is not my native language so correct me if I´m wrong. A dongle is something that sticks out right? the picture doesn´t show one. It has a Texas Instruments chipset just like the LaCie! Only firewire 400 though. Supposed to work for PC also but seems to be more a mac card. Less tried and true than LaCie.


The advanced dock is a bit unportable and I wouldn´t trust it (or USB for that matter) with a 36 channel 24 bit 96kHz audio card. At
least not for recording at low latency. With high track count and very CPU intensive music programs running at same time the USB protocol is not very reliable.


Tip #1 looks very interesting. I´m not sure what a PCMCIA extender board is though could you explain? Link?

[RonS]

The Welovemacs.com card looks perfect. A "dongle" is usually a piece of hardware that attaches to a computer that allows software to run. But in this case, I'm sure it means that you get a cable, with one end plugging into the card and the other end extending out to a gang of two or three connectors, which means it will clear the bottom of the ExpressCard, which will be sitting above.

[idebb]

This is all good news!

However, I now have to rephrase my first question;

Can I capture DV to a FW harddrive on the same welovemacs firewire 400 (!) pcmcia card?

I´ve read somwhere that problems could arise with daisy-chain FW400 video capture on a PC. Even though the bandwidth is supposed to be enough. Macs no problem.

True or false?

[RonS]

I have friends who have mentioned problems running video editing sessions (FW in and out) on the same FW interface card. One said that the problems arise when you have to data streams (say, a FW hard drive and a FW camera) using the same interrupt, but I'm already talking more than I know.

My guess is that, since you will have two separate physical interfaces, they *should* get their own hardware resources (ie, interrupt), so you should be fine. But again, it's just a guess.

[idebb]

Could you post me a screencap of your IRQ table on the T60?


And just to clarify... the FW 800 is still capable of two data streams on the same card unlike the FW 400? Your friend tried a FW400 bus right.


Thanks