Will HV10 work with Firewire 800?
 

Will the HV10 connect and transfer (for capture) with Firewire 800 (IEEE 1394b) at high speed, or is it restricted to the lower transfer speed of Firewire 400? If it will work with Firewire 800, can you recommend a PCI card that I can add to my PC? TIA.

Think firewire 800 is a different cable Im afraid.

It will work fine with FW800 with a FW800-400 cable or cable adaptor but you probably won't see any real speed advantage since the cam has a FW400 interface. Since HDV is basically the same data rate as DV FW400 is plenty fast.

Firewire 100
 

The HV10 operates on firewire at 100 mbps. So 400 or 800 will not effect the transfer rate from/to the camera. I have heard that the firewire bus operates all devices on that firewire channel at the lowest speed of all devices. If that is true then any HD on the bus would be limited to 100. However, even if you are capturing from the camera to a firewire disk, that is still 25 out and 25 back. Which is only 50 out of the 100 availble.

Rick

Jim: There is no use for faster connection, because the video is captured from tape to harddrive at the playback speed! you can't speed up the capturing process. 40min of video footage takes 40min to capture no matter how fast your editing system and Firewire is...

Rick: that doesn't seem to be the case at least with my portable editing system (MacBook Pro). I have maximum of 2 HDs and camera in one FW bus and the drives are all working at max speed even when the camera is connected.

Thanks, guys. :)

While I'm on the subject of Firewire, would a firewire/usb external drive like the "Western Digital MyBook Pro 500GB Triple Interface (USB 2.0 and Firewire 400/800) External Hard Drive - WDG1T5000N" (buy.com) be fast enough for HD video editing requirements? If so, would just Firewire 400 or USB 2.0 be fast enough, since that's all my PC has? Should I install the editing software (e.g., Vegas 7) on the external drive, or put it on an internal drive and just use the external drive for data files?

I wouldn't recommend the USB interface for Hard Disks. it is meant for keyboards, mouses, etc.. ;)

Even if the USB 2 is faster than Firewire 400 in THEORY, this is not the case in practice.

FW400 disk is enough for "basic" editing. it is capable of playing back at least 2-3 tracks simultaneously. If you need more, buy SATA RAID array =)

I don't know much about windows-based editing systems, but I recommend to keep applications and media in different disks. Use one HD for video only. Keep it clean and format it each time you start a new project. This keeps the disk unfragmented.