Capturing to a Hard drive?
 

Hi all,

I got my XL-2 in December, so I'm new to doing video
at this level. I liked the idea of swapping lenses since I
do some wildlife photography to. I got my XL - Nikon
adapter today from Les, so I'll be able to use my Nikon
lenses.

My next issue is capturing the video on something other
than a tape. I'd like to know what configuration that
others are using to capture video directly to a laptop, or
some other device. What port, cable, software, to use?

Thanks,
Ron

http://www.beatteay.net

Well I am no expert. I know that you need to capture it onto you HD with firewire. It is about the fastest but mist of all I beleive you will drop fewer frames.

One question that I have..

I am capturing from my XL2 to an External Hard Drive. (XL2 --> PC--> External HD) I currently have Firewire between my camera and PC. But my question is do I need it also from my PC to my Hard Drive?

I have been using a USB to my Hard drive. But today, I got a new hard drive that came with another Firewire.

Two Firewires are better than one
 

Hi Guy,

Yes, if you have an external Firewire hard disk, you'll need a second Firewire board. Hopefully you already have a Firewire port on your laptop so you'll be able to add a PCMCIA card and off you go. Sometimes I use this configuration, using a fast Lacie 800 PCMCIA card connected to a large G-RAID external drive (beginning with the XL-2 Firewire into my PCs internal Firewire port). But it's my understanding that Firewire devices are not simultaneously bidirectional. And unfortunately, while USB-2 has a fast peak transfer burst rate, for something like continuous video we need at least a Firewire 400.

FYI - if you need to use an internal laptop drive, you'll probably need a 7200 RPM drive (many 5600 RPM drives aren't fast enough, causing dropouts).

Good luck, Michael

Very true. FireWire operates at the speed of the slowest device - with camcorders this is often 100Mbps.

I only capture to USB2.0 drives (some have FireWire but I always dedicate FireWire to the video equipment). I have never had any problems with dropping frames using USB2.0 drives including those connected to a laptop.

DV and HDV run at 25Mbps (plus a bit of overhead). USB2.0 has ample headroom. The CPU requirement is quite minimal, too.

Unfortunately, I can only use my laptop for editing. My desktop is too old/slow and low on memory.

My laptop has the removeable card and the card has two slots. Do you know if I can use these two ports simultaniously? One for input and one for output? I was thinking this would not work, but they had to design it with two for a reason.

Is there a image quality problem here or is the only concern dropping frames? If it is dropped frames then I should be OK with the USB. It seems to handle all the frames unless I try and do other stuff while capturing.

Rehi,

Yes, technically you shouldn't have any problems plugging in two PCMCIA Firewire cards into your laptop, with one in (from camera) and one out (to external disk).

Right, the problem will be lost frames - potentially creating nasty video and audio issues.

Good luck, Michael

To use two FireWire PCMCIA cards, you need to get ones that will physically fit at the same time.

Most are bulky. ADS have a model that uses a dongle to connect to the card so that you can have two at the same time. I have these.

Regarding one for input and one for output, if you only have the XL2, you don't need two cards.

If you have two DV devices (e.g., the XL2 and another device for output), you can usually get two device to happily work together on the same interface.