Re: Firewire 400 vs. 800

Ryan,

Reading your original and subsequent posts I think you've got a fundamental misunderstanding going on here.

Capturing from any camera, whether DV or HDV, over firewire, uses FW400 protocol and speed. Nothing you can do will improve this, or improve picture quality as you do so.

FW800 runs at twice the speed of 400 (as the name suggests) but even if you connect a camera to an 800 port it will still be at 400 speed. There is no advantage. FW800 only comes in to it's own when we're talking about storage - and even then there are caveats. Most Macs, even those that have FW400 and 800, share the same bus for both 400 and 800. That means that if you connect a 400 drive and an 800, the 800 will run at 400.

Now, on your MBPro, by adding an express34 card and plugging in an external drive to that (whether SATA or FW) you're adding another bus - so plugging your camera in to the FW400 port on the Macbook, and ingesting to the external FW or SATA drive, you're maximising speed, keeping the ingest bus separate from the storage one (think of water going up and down the same pipe at the same time) and avoiding the cardinal sin of ANY NLE setup - storing media on your system drive.

HTH


Jason

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