So many firewire cards - which one to get?!
 

Hi,

I am wanting to edit video from my gs400. I already have some editing software, but now need a firewire card. I am confused by the huge amount of different ones available - ranging from 20$-1000s. All i want to do is capture video (often will be wide 16:9) without dropping frames. Ive been thinking of getting a very cheap LaCie 3-port firewire400 card. Or will a card like this not be sufficient for capturing video?

Thanks

Josef

i'd get the cheapest one, with the fewest amount of ports... hook the external hard drives up via the usb 2.0 port instead of firewire.

you could look at the chipsets on the cards, if you wanted to differentiate 'em... maybe get a card with the the ti(texas instruments) chipset.

I would at least get a FireWire800 card much faster and better for video...Then again I don't know what's available for a mac..

IEEE 1394a (FireWire 400) is plenty more than enough for DV video transfers. DV video is only 3.6Mbs per second, which works out to somewhere around 25Mbps. As you can see, 25Mbps is nowhere near the bandwidth of the IEEE 1394a standard of 400Mbps. There is no reason to get IEEE 1394b (FireWire 800) if transferring DV video is all you will be doing. However, FireWire 800 can be useful for high-bandwidth tasks like external hard drives (for those few devices that currently support it, anyway).

Oh I should have read the thread.. I thought it was about external harddrives.. If not, yeah any firewire card, port, dodad would do..