My wife and I bought a new video camera. We bought it mainly because of the advertised computer connectivity. (We want to e-mail videos of our child to relatives.) The salesman assured us that the connection cable would most likely fit our new computer. (At first glance, it looked like a USB cable.)
Sadly, when we got home, I found out it didn’t. It’s a IEEE 1394 cable; 4-pin on the camera side, 6-pin on the computer side.
Does anyone have any experience with this technology? What additional hardware do I need?
Each of us, at some time in our lives, turns to someone - a father, a brother, a God - and asks, “Why am I here? What was I meant to be?”
what you have is called “firewire” and what you need is a firewire port into your motherboard. It won’t plug into a USB port, and no there is no converter. You need an adapter card to plug into your computer, or if that is not an option, return this camera for one with a USB plug.
I struggle every day to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.
IEEE 1394 has been trying to establish itself as a standard for video data transmission for a while now, but it’s not coming along as well as many (especially the HDTV manufacturers) had hoped.
Sony’s VAIO line of desktop and laptop Home Studio PCs have IEEE 1394 ports – Sony’s proprietary name for the technology is “i.Link” or some variation of the spelling. I’m not aware of any other PCs that have a FireWire port standard, but I’m sure there must be if you look around enough.
–Da Cap’n
“Playin’ solitaire 'til dawn
With a deck of fifty-one.”
I know this probably doesn’t help any, but Firewire is (or will be) standard on all Macs – they’re pushing real hard to get it to replace SCSI and USB as an external interface.
(I heard this from a friend who works for Apple writing Firewire protocols…judge for yourself how reliable that is.)
Firewire is an invention of Apple’s, and they’re charging a license fee for every port built. Recently a new standard was proposed for USB-2 (backwards compatible with USB) which would have comparable performance with 1394, but is an open standard. I was expecting Firewire to be big, but the Apple license fee thing might just kill it.
AWB, you may wish to keep the camera and get the firewire (1394) port. It is much faster than USB and can be used to stream the video off of a camera in realtime. Any camera with USB will likely be a still camera, or a toy, as USB is very low bandwidth (compared to what is needed for uncompressed video).
Firewire is also shaping up to be useful for things like external hard drives, scanners, and other devices. It has the additional benefit of not requiring a computer in the connection, so you could transfer video between the video camera and another device without having to plug into a PC.
Technical stuff:
USB2, the successor to USB, will be out ‘soon’ and theoretically supports firewire-level speeds. But it’s a bit of a sham. It’s backwards compatible, but deviced like a USB mouse, will use the slow USB standard, thus removing large ammount of time the bus could be used by USB2 devices. To make it compatible with older devices, the handshaking (setting up a data transfer) also takes place at slow speeds, so old devices can interpret it and know to ignore it, which further eats into the time. USB2 also still requires a computer as a go between. This means a transfer from one device to another would have to go to the computer in the middle, thus dividing the effective speed by two. It’s a nice idea for scanners and other seldom-used (not streaming data) devices, but for a camera, especially a fairly high end one, it’s not a good solution, and that would be if you could actually buy it now.
Firewire is out, fast, effective, and owns its niche, even if it is a small one.
Just as an addendum: The first digital video cameras with firewire was built so that you cannot RECORD from input to the firewire. The logic there is that the industry was all caught up with trying to prevent anyone from making perfect copies of digital video, say from a DVD.
If you want to record video on your computer, a firewire solution is perfect. I have a Sony DV camcorder, and a Pyro 1394 firewire card, which comes bundled with Ulead MediaStudio, a decent but not great video editing app.
My old system used a video capture card and an analog camcorder. The quality was far worse and it was more hassle.
USB video cameras are fine for doing webcam stuff where you are basically taking a series of stills in low-res and displaying them once a second or so. But for high-resolution full motion video, you either need a firewire setup or a high quality video capture system.
Oh, and you’ll need a fast computer and a humongous hard drive. Don’t even think about trying it unless you have at least a PII300 and a 10G or bigger hard drive with a fast transfer rate.