Can I capture with USB 2.0 or does it have to be Firewire?

[sdsumike619]

If I'm capturing miniDV footage from a camera (via firewire) to an external hard drive, can that hard drive be connected via USB 2.0 or does it also have to be connected via firewire (to the computer) ?

[Baldrick]

Try! The connection should be fast enough if it's really usb2.

Or haven't you bought the usb2 hard drive yet?

[JohnnyMalaria]

Use a USB2.0 drive. Camcorders don't play fair and act like spoilt brats when other things want to use the FireWire - weird things can happen ranging from outright lock-up to slow, erratic transfer.

I *used* to have FireWire drives (when I only had USB1.1 ports). The drives also had USB2.0. I now only use them on USB2.0 and have never, ever had an issue with them being too slow. Never dropped a frame. In fact, on FireWire, the slowest device dictates the overall speed. A 400Mbps FireWire drive may be crippled into running at 100Mbps if the camcorder only operates at that speed (this has nothing to do with the video data rate of 25Mbps, though).

[sdsumike619]

That's great news because up til now I've been buying the combo firewire/usb drives because I thought I had to use firewire for capturing. The deals are much better on the usb alone drives, thanks for the info!

[edDV]

That's great news because up til now I've been buying the combo firewire/usb drives because I thought I had to use firewire for capturing. The deals are much better on the usb alone drives, thanks for the info!

It should work with your hardware. Just don't load the CPU during DV stream transfer. The CPU is acting as USB2 disk controller.

[lordsmurf]

You're really better off using the Firewire or an internal IDE/SATA drive. You'll likely drop frames on the USB2 drive.

[sdsumike619]

I have a core 2 quad so I think it should be fine.. Come to think of it, since the drives I have now are firewire/usb combo, I can just test it now!, duh!

[JohnnyMalaria]

LS - I've never had a dropped frame with USB2.0 drives even when capturing three simultaneous streams (a Pentium D 2.8 desktop) to two external drives. On a Thinkpad with a 1.5GHz single core processor, I captured to two drives without a hitch. On the same laptop, I captured an 8-hour live feed from an HDV cam without any issues to a USB2.0 drive.

The DV data rate is so low (comparatively) that if you drop frames, you've got a problem somewhere else.

[edDV]

...
The DV data rate is so low (comparatively) that if you drop frames, you've got a problem somewhere else.

Usually related to CPU interupts from other running programs. The CPU is the USB disk controller.