Daisy chain miniDV camera to external firewire drive to PC or ?

[rockitman]

I hope this hasn't already been covered but I've searched for several days and everything I find is either very old, very contradictory or deals with a Mac environment, rather than Windows. Anyway, I have about 30 analog 8mm tapes (and an equal number of Beta tapes) that I want to archive. I plan to run them through a Canon Elura miniDV using the pass through feature and then save the dv avi files on external hard drives, using WinDV. I only have about 40 GB free on my internal drive. Is it better to daisy chain the Canon miniDV to a external HDD via Firewire and then Firewire from the HDD to the computer, so I can capture direct to the external drive? (I asked at Staples and they didn't even have an external drive with 2 firewire ports, so any suggestions on that would help, too). Or, would it be better to transfer the dv files direct to internal drive one at a time (they are 120 minutes, so I guess would be about 27 GB per tape), and then move that file over to the external drive via USB, since I only have one firewire port on the pc? Or, could I just connect the miniDV camera to the pc with firewire and transfer direct to the external drive, connected by USB?

Also, while I'm at it, I would like to make another copy of each tape on DVD or ? that I could play on my PS3 to actually watch the videos, as well as be another backup copy. I understand that PS3 doesn't currently support dv avi files, so I couldn't play them from the HDD. With such huge dv files, any suggestions on how to create viewable copies, while still maintaining highest quality (I don't plan on editing at this time). I have previously tried using a standalone dvd recorder to copy the tapes, but the quality was seriously lacking, not to mention that they are of no use for future editing and have questionable lifespans. Thanks in advance for advice.

[edDV]

You cannot transfer direct from a DV camcorder to a Firewire hard drive. It must be comtrolled by a disk controller. There are drives with built-in CPU and disk controller but the cost is high. See the Firestore FS4 line.
http://www.focusinfo.com/dynassets/documents/products/Focus%20FS-4%20Line.pdf

Most reliable is recording first to the internal hard drive, then copy to the USB2 drive. This is because the USB2 disc controller is a software process with potential for interrupt from OS or application activity. This frame loss vulerabilty is only there during real time DV stream capture.

Fast multi-core machines should be reasonably reliable for streaming DV to to an external USB2 drive but not as reliable as the internal ATA/SATA drive.

DV makes an excellent archive and editing format. For media player camcorder video playback, I prefer 480i MPeg2 at fast bit rates (>8Mb/s). Software deinterlace will make camcorder video appear jumpy and/or blurred unless sophisticated AVISynth motion adaptive bobbers are used. These take many hours per hour of video to process. I say, let the hardware HDTV deinterlacer do the job in real time.

[rockitman]

Thanks for quick response. I probably used the wrong wording in saying "capture direct to the external drive". In searching online I found several instances of people saying you could use the external drive daisy chained with firewire between the miniDV camera and the computer. I assume that the external drive is still using the disc controller on the pc and it would just save a step from having to move the dv file after capture and then delete off of the internal drive. A number of these were posts from around 2005 - 2006 or were on Mac related sites, so I'm wondering if any one has tried this on a PC recently with success.

[redwudz]

Just my opinion, but you would be running a lot of data both ways on that FireWire connection. When I've done DV transfers from my ADVC-100, I couldn't transfer to the PC and out to a FireWire drive at the same time. But transfer to the PC and out to USB worked. Though, as mentioned, USB can get interrupted by the OS, so not the greatest setup for streaming where interrupts can cause dropped frames.

If your PC is newer, and we aren't talking about a laptop, a external eSATA drive would be perfect. It operates exactly the same speed as a internal drive. If you have a free PCI slot and a free SATA socket on your motherboard, you could use a PCI slot adapter with a eSATA socket on it and a eSATA external drive. And you can plug in additional drives for more future storage.

Or just add another internal drive if you have the space and a free 3.5" HDD slot and connector. You may be aware that DV uses about 13GB per hour of video, so you should be able to estimate the room needed for your files.

And if you only have 40GB free on your internal drive, and it's more than 3/4 full, you probably need more space anyway.


And welcome to our forums.

[edDV]

ATA/SATA and eSATA are always hardware controllers. IEEE-1394 is also a hardware controller but doesn't seem to work for simultanous DV stream import + IEEE-1394 disk control unless two interface cards are configured separately.

USB2 disk control is usually a software process.

[rockitman]

Thank you both for the answers and welcome. For archiving, it looks like I will just capture to the internal drive over firewire and then copy the dv avi file to the external drive via USB, then delete off of internal drive and repeat with next tape. As for my second dilemma, I have been studying the posts most of the day, and it appears that it is a common one. That is, what to do with the huge dv files to make them viewable on a HDTV and yet retain high quality for back-up as well. For now, I think I will wait and hope that Sony will issue an update for the PS3 to allow playing the dv avi files. Thanks again, great site with a wealth of information.

[edDV]

...
As for my second dilemma, I have been studying the posts most of the day, and it appears that it is a common one. That is, what to do with the huge dv files to make them viewable on a HDTV and yet retain high quality for back-up as well. For now, I think I will wait and hope that Sony will issue an update for the PS3 to allow playing the dv avi files. Thanks again, great site with a wealth of information.

For DV camcorder material, I use DVD spec interlace Mpeg2 (bottom field first, >8Mb/s) for now. I'm not yet happy with interlace H.264. Interlace VC-1 is fine but the file sizes are similar to DVD MPeg2 so there is no effective file compression. VC-1 interlace is intended to compress 90Mb/s interlace Digi-Beta to 10-20 Mb/s.