Downloading HV30 to Fujitsu laptop

[Robert Spoecker]

Hi everyone.

I come from a still camera background and know about nothing of movie cameras.

I have a cannon 5D mark II and shot some hi definition movies but soon decided that shooting 12 minutes at a time to a 4 gig card was not gonna satisfy me so I forged ahead and bought an HV30. I also bought Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9.0 and thought I could do my editing on a Fujitsu laptop running windows XP.

I then found the lap top did not have a Fire Wire port so I ordered a 3 port fire wire device to plug into my computer's 32-bit CardBus PCMCIA Type II standard compliant device.

At the same time I ordered a HDV/DV to Fire Wire cable and it just does not work.

I used the same cable to connect to my Macintosh which has a Fire Wire port and used the Macintosh's Moviemaker software and it works great.

I realize that the PCMCIA card might still be faulty but I just don't believe that yet. I think Fujitsu's flavor of XP does not support Fire Wire as it should.

Has anyone run into this (or similar problem) and come up with a solution or am I just going to be forced to buy a computer with built in Fire Wire support? I would probably get nothing but a vista machine anymore (ugh).

Thanks for your consideration.

I am looking forward to making moving pictures along with my still pictures.

Robert

[Ray Bell]

Robert this is just a guess but you might look into this....

On my computer I decided to go and add in an adaptor that is firewire800...

I bought the card, plugged it in and it did not work... I figured the laptop would
provide the power to the card... it didn't and I had to purchase the wall wart power
supply for the card... after plugging the card into the computer and the power supply
plugged into the card it worked fine....

as a side note... if you can get a laptop that has a express card slot your setup will
be that much more versatile....

with a express card slot you can use "firewire800" to offload your Canon 5D MK II files
and you can also use the non-compressed HDMI output from your HV30 to capture
the footage right off of the sensor or offload the tape. With this method you don't
even have to use tape at all....

[Robert Spoecker]

Thanks for the help Ray, it pointed me in the right direction.

I will report what I did to solve the problem in the hope it might help someone else running into similar issues.

PC computers do not like Firewire. The only way to get them to use Firewire (IEEE 1394) is to use an adaptor.

Adaptors for PC note books come in two types...

PCMCIA cards which are older technology.
ExpressCard 34 and EpressCard 54 which are 34 and 54mm wide.

Some LapTops have only an ExpressCard 34 slot (like my Macintosh PowerBook) and some have a 54mm slot that accepts both ExpressCards 34 and 54, like my Fujitsu laptop PC.

The problem is that the PCMCIA card fits into a 54mm ExpressCard slot. It never makes a connection to the internal pins, which is a good thing but the bad thing is that the PCMCIA card slides in and for about the last 1/4 inch there is a slight amount resistance which I took to be the mating of the signal pins. I suspect the grounding strip near the pin end of the PCMCIA is causing this slight friction.

I have ordered an ExpressCard 34 to Firewire card and this solved all my problems.

Camcorders have a 4 pin Firewire miniature socket that they do not call a Firewire device socket. They call it an HDV/DV connector but the other end of the connecting cable is indeed a Firewire connector. Something as useful as that is of course not part of the camcorder package.

PCMCIA, Expresscard 34, ExpressCard 54, HDV/DV are all issues that could have been made much clearer. Why did they not make the ExpressCard 54 sockets lightly different so a PCMCIA card can't slide into it?

The learning curve to take digital still images and the post processing thereof is very steep so why should digital movie making be any different?

Robert