Capturing video data from handheld digital tape camera??

[robert213]

Soon, I will be recording a video using a Sony digital camcorder.

From my limited knowledge, the best way to physically connect the camcorder to a laptop is thru the firewire port.

My T30 does not have a firewire port. Nor does its port replicator.

So it appears that I will be shopping for a firewire port (either 4-pin or 6-pin) PCMCIA card.

Does anyone have any recommendations, suggestions, or comments?

Will my T30 have enough CPU power to capture video data? I plan to use Windows Media Player to capture data. Then, I plan to move the video data over to my GF's Dell D620 (Intel Core Duo T2400 @ 1.83GHz) to be editted using Adobe Premiere 7.0 (using either a 16GB USB Flashdrive or both computers networked together using my Linksys wireless router).

Her Dell D620 does not have a firewire port either. So, I will need to purchase a firewire PCMCIA card either way.

Edit #01
Please clarify differences between...
IEEE 1394a and 1394b
4-pin and 6-pin
400 and 800 Mbps

[rkawakami]

There are also USB video capture adapters, but as the T30 still only has USB 1.1, it may be limited (i.e., slow). For the few times I needed to transfer video from a MiniDV camcorder I used my Gateway laptop with a built-in Firewire port or a T23 and a PCMCIA adapter. Those adapters are a Q-Stor USB 2.0 + 1394 Firewire unit and an Apricorn Dual Igniter 4000 which is covered in this thread:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=49706

The Apricorn has the advantage of being a flush-mounting card. It DOES require a dongle but if you like to keep the card in one of the slots without stuff sticking out of the side, then this one works pretty good. The advantage of the Q-Stor is that is also has USB 2.0 ports, but has a huge nodule protruding from the laptop.

[robert213]

Thanks for your prompt reply...

I already have AKE's flush-mounted USB 2.0 PC Card, so I could purchase a USB firewire port adapter.

Also, I have been happy with Apricorn's Drivewire USB IDE/PATA/SATA HDD adapter, so I will take a closer look at Apricorn's Dual Igniter 4000 PC Card.

Edit #01
Selling at $15, I think that I'll purchase directly from Apricorn first thing Monday morning...
http://www.apricorn.com/product_detail. ... eg&id=1203

[loyukfai]

I remember using a Dell notebook equipped with a P4-M 1.6GHz (or 1.8...) and a PC Card 1394 adapter to capture video from a DV camcorder with satisfactory result. So I think your T30 should be fine too.

See this post for a quick explanation of the different terms: http://club.cdfreaks.com/f7/firewire-ty ... post787814

Besides that, the 6-pin version can carry power too.

Wikipedia has more information if you're interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewire

Cheers.

[robert213]

I borrowed another machine that has a firewire port so that I could capture the video from the Sony Camcorder.
This video file has approximately 12GB of data.

I would like to copy this video file over to my GF's machine which has Adobe Premiere 7.0 (video editting program).

I thought that the easiest way would be to use one of her SanDisk Cruzer 16GB Flash drives. I chose one that had never been used.

I receive...

Copy
The disk in the destination drive is full.
Insert a new disk to continue
[Retry] [Cancel]

I was able to copy the video file over by
1. removing the HDD from the machine that I borrowed
2. and connecting it to my USB HDD adapter (Apricorn Drivewire)

Still, I am very curious as to why I was unable to copy a 12GB video file onto a 16GB flashdrive??? I verified free space in Windows Explorer. The only data that I found was a zipped file folder containing 5 MB of flash drive system programs and a launcher program.

[loyukfai]

What's the partition format of the flash drive? FAT16 allows a maximum of 4GB per file only.

[robert213]

What's the partition format of the flash drive? FAT16 allows a maximum of 4GB per file only.

Thanks, I keep forgeting about the differences between FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS file structures.

http://www.ntfs.com/fat-32structure.htm

NTFS General Information > The FAT File System > FAT32 Features

File System Specifications
FAT32 Features
The following topics describe the FAT32 file system.

File System Specifications
Boot Sector and Bootstrap Modifications
FAT Mirroring
Partition Types


File System Specifications
FAT32 is a derivative of the File Allocation Table (FAT) file system that supports drives with over 2GB of storage. Because FAT32 drives can contain more than 65,526 clusters, smaller clusters are used than on large FAT16 drives. This method results in more efficient space allocation on the FAT32 drive.

The largest possible file for a FAT32 drive is 4GB minus 2 bytes.

The FAT32 file system includes four bytes per cluster within the file allocation table. Note that the high 4 bits of the 32-bit values in the FAT32 file allocation table are reserved and are not part of the cluster number.