I just bought a Western Digital 500 GB external hard drive I am trying to capture my HD clips to it using Vegas Pro 8 via Fire Wire from my Canon XH A1. This particular External hard drive has 2 fire wire ports, 1 Eithernet port (not an option for me) and 1 USB port. My PC has only 1 Fire Wire port.

My question is, can I use both Fire Wire ports simultaneously (kind of like in series???) by hooking my PC (Widows Vista) to 1 and my Video Camera to the other? Will that capture to the external drive?

The way I imagine it is this. Connect my camera to the hard drive via Fire Wire, then connect the hard drive to my PC on the second port of the hard drive also via Fire Wire. Is this how it is supposed to be? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Tim

Tim, it is worth a try. Sometimes it works this way.

The issue that frequently crops up is that the camera protocol and the hard drive protocol that run on the firewire bus are sometimes incompatible.

All is not lost - just switch your drive to USB, keep your camera on firewire, and be happy as you watch the magic work.

Although Firewire400 is better than USB2 for capture in theory, in practice anybody who has tried USB2 for DV and HDV capture has been happy. And that includes me, for many, many years.

Thank You Seth, I really appreciate your help! I will follow your suggestion.

When you put more than one peripheral on a FireWire bus, the bus runs at the speed of the slowest device. This means that a hard drive rated at 400Mbps may end up running at 100Mbps. The camcorder may need up to 35Mbps (25 + overhead), leaving very little for the hard drive.

Also, many camcorders (DV and HDV) really don't like playing with their friends(!) and want to have the whole bus to themselves (or, at most, one other).

In my experience, it is always less painful to keep the FireWire free for the camcorder(s) and put external storage on USB/SATA/another independent FireWire interface. For capturing purposes, the performance differences between FireWire hard drives and USB 2.0 hard drives are unimportant.

Check out this Guy, He has many good tips for vegas. here's a link to one that might help.
YouTube - Optimize disk settings in Sony Vegas & Movie Studio (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjMKpyvwdXk&feature=channel_page)

Thanks You guys, this info helped a lot.

Tim

Also, many camcorders (DV and HDV) really don't like playing with their friends(!) and want to have the whole bus to themselves (or, at most, one other).

That was certainly the case with my old Canon XM2, four or five years ago. It just would NOT play ball with my external firewire drive(s). The Canon would hog the bus and not release it afterwards. Only a reboot would give me the drives back. Would Canon acknoledge it? Nah. When I switched to USB the problem went away and I can't think of any capturing trouble that I have had since then.