IAC DISCUSSION FORUMS

A friend borrowed my camcorder and was horrified to find it recorded onto MiniDV tape not memory cards. No problem, I said, just download it direct from the tape through the camcorder into your PC.

Her laptop has Adobe Elements but no firewire port. The camcorder exports via ... well, you guessed.

So has anyone practical experience of any of the firewire-to-usb systems that are around?

All advice will be gratefully received.

Dave

This person thinks it isn't possible ... http://www.focusrite.com/answerbase/en/ ... hp?id=1092

But eBay suggests there are lots of gizmos available.

This frequent changing from one format to another among manufacturers, with no or little backwards compatibility is a real pain - and one wonders whether its driven by the desire to sell more product than to achieve 'higher standards'.

I will stick with miniDV even though it is poo-pooed now by many on umpteen different grounds ... happy in the knowledge that everything I have works and works with with everything else I have video wise.

And at around £1 for 16GB, miniDV isn't an expensive medium, and easy to store away...

Dunno about any gizmos, but even if they work ***, if he has a desktop PC then buying a firewire card is definitely the most reliable way to do it and the cheapest (Other than getting you to capture onto yours and transferring via an external hard disk - which would be my suggestion if he has a laptop)

*** and I cannot see how they can without all sorts of buffering going on as USB doesn't sustain a high enough bit rate. Maybe USB 3.0?

If the laptop has a cardbus slot , one similar to this does the job, http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3-Port-1394-F ... 27bae6e4d6
I use one with my Lenove netbook successfully.


Chris