Firewire/DV Cable

Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 10:12 am

Hey guys.

Got a Sony DCR HC37E camera (someone elses) which records to miniDV tape. Sparing my rant about the problems of sequential media, I'd like to get the recordings to the computer. So would the guy who owns it.

Is a DV port just the same as a 4-pin firewire and if I plug a standard firewire from a DV/iLink port on the camera to a laptop, will it work with the necessary software, or is an extra chipset needed to make the hardware compatible?

Thanks.

Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 11:24 am

I have a DCR-HC40 with the same connection.

I do not remember where I got the cable, but it connects directly into my firewire port. I did not have to install any drivers or anything that I can think of, just plugged it in and there it was...

If I can track down the cable# or mfgr. I'll let you know.

Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 11:28 am

This is similar to mine, but I believe I got it from a third party (mine is clear, you can see the shield through the jacket - not colored like the Sony cable).

Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 7:32 pm

OK thanks a lot.
Got a 4pin firewire cable, since I dont have a FW port, but the guy who's camera it is's laptop has one, this should all work out ok. I got some files off it earlier, I was posting here to get ahead of the game in terms of potential problems. But it all worked (too) smoothly (for my liking).

Except that I need about an hour of files off it in time to make a 5min film for Sunday night, with no chance of getting the stuff until tomorrow at 6 and no chance to work on it Sunday morning.
They said firewire was fast, lol.

Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 2:08 am

Yeah, living in real time's a bummer...

Speaking of which, I really need to get around to dumping a few home videos myself...

Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 10:33 am

Quote:

Except that I need about an hour of files off it in time to make a 5min film for Sunday night,

Welcome to video editing!!! I have seen 200 hours of video tape digitized to create a 1 hour show!!!
There are people in LA that do this for a living, they are called digitizers, and it pays $35 hr

Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 10:37 am

Ive done some stuff before. Ended up with 12gig of recorded and compressed files of one guy's HDD camera and made 6 mins of it. Madness.

I think the guy who's camera I was working with has stuff dating back from Christmas.

Posted: Mon Apr 28, 2008 8:39 am

Quote:

They said firewire was fast, lol.

You should understand you are rolling tape, in real time, firewire isn't the bottleneck!!

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 5:52 am

I love it when clients come in to our facility and ask to have some videos put onto DVDs for their use. We charge by the hour. They ask how much it will cost and I ask them how long are the videos. When I know the length I can give them the estimate. They always ask "why will it take so long to put the videos into the computer?" so I have to tell them that it is all done in "real time" to which they almost always say "well why don't you do it faster so it doesn't cost me as much?" Real time means REAL TIME and it is not because we want to charge them more it is because that is how long it takes us to do the work. Rolling Eyes

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 11:35 am

Well job is now done. I'm not too chuffed with some of the stuff, but everyone else likes it.
Perfectionism. Gah!

And I was only awake until 5:45 AM editing and rendering it.

BTW, does the WMV codec ALWAYS use a 2-pass ultra slow encoding process? Rendered and completed pass 1 in 18 mins. I then sat for another 30 waiting on it rendering a second, sitting for a while, rendering a second, sitting...

Posted: Wed Apr 30, 2008 10:56 am

Thomas W. Bethel wrote:

I love it when clients come in to our facility and ask to have some videos put onto DVDs for their use. We charge by the hour. They ask how much it will cost and I ask them how long are the videos. When I know the length I can give them the estimate. They always ask "why will it take so long to put the videos into the computer?" so I have to tell them that it is all done in "real time" to which they almost always say "well why don't you do it faster so it doesn't cost me as much?" Real time means REAL TIME and it is not because we want to charge them more it is because that is how long it takes us to do the work. Rolling Eyes

Ask them why they didn't record it faster!!!

Sorry, I couldn't resist...

Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2008 2:25 pm

OK, I go on about necroposters and voila, I join the ranks.

However I have a question pertaining to the topic title, it's the same camera, but in a different situation.

---------
tl;dr - Realtime streaming from firewire equipped Camcorder onto decent laptop, circa 6 hours?
---------

Does anyone with experience of this sort of thing know if it's possible to stream video in realtime from the camera. Rather than record to tape, record out via the cable, and onto the computer in real time. We're thinking of doing a recording that could be between 3 and 7 hours (per day) and it would be easier to go straight to an external HDD.

I'm looking for info on the above just now, but the other catch...

It's going to be done (if it's done) via a laptop, a relatively high end Core Duo - onto a USB 2.0 external drive.
Will this cause problems (power isn't a problem).

Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2008 10:34 pm

It depends (not the diaper but on the equipment)

We have done this on occasion with our FX-1 and a Sony Vaio Laptop and an external drive. My suggestion is to try it. We are using Vegas 8.0C for the recording, a 2.8 MHz laptop and a Seagate USB2 external hard drive and it all works well. There are drives that you can hook up directly to the camera via FW but they cost in the $700 range.

http://www.mcetech.com/quickstreamdv/index.html

http://www.videoguys.com/FireStore.html

You might want to read this even though you are NOT using Apple.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA26556?viewlocale=en_US

Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 1:34 pm

Thanks.
I was actually thinking of trying it. Shame it's not my laptop or It'd be easier.
The drive will be USB 2.0.

So you don't think that after 3 hours the gear might just ditch the job at hand (I'll assume some frame drops are to be expected).

My biggest problem is going to be changing my drive to be NTFS instead of Fat32 (goddamn 4GB limitation makes me cry).

The alternative is to do these recordings onto another camera which uses a 20GB HDD, but I don't think it's as good quality, and the files are hellish to work with.

Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 2:52 pm

[quote="Codemonkey"
So you don't think that after 3 hours the gear might just ditch the job at hand (I'll assume some frame drops are to be expected).
[/quote]

I wouldn't bank on windows not tanking.
Depends on the system and the setup.

Can you do it in sections?

This topic sponsored by: