Thanks, that's exactly what I was looking for... however it says "...not yet Vista compatible..."

Best Solution: $4 firewire card for the emachine

Might Work solution: Get an external hard drive with firewire and USB ports. Attach camera to the hard drive via firewire, then hook up hard drive via USB to your computer. Daisy chain. Works on mac at least.

Dear Joey,

While a IEEE 1394 (Firewire) and USB may seem similar, they are vastly different. Firewire is designed for low latency, which is required to properly capture your footage without dropouts.

Capturing footage from your Canon XL1s is a fairly demanding activity, as far as the computer is concerned.

You can save yourself a lot of trouble by getting a proper firewire card and then connecting your XL1s to the firewire card.

Note: You will need a 4-pin to 6-Pin Firewire cable as most all firewire cards have a 6-pin firewire connection.

Note: You need an original IEEE 1394 Firewire card (400 Mhz) and not IEEE1394b which is 800 Mhz. The original is also known as IEEE 1394a.

As strange as it may sound, the best practice when connecting firewire cables is to have your computer and camera off. Then connect the cables and power up both devices. I recommend that you power up the computer first, then after the bootup sequence is complete, power up your camera.

This may sound like a like of trouble, but it could save you from blowing out your Firewire port on the camera, or the computer.

You want a direct connection from your camera to the firewire port on your computer. Daisy chaining may work, but is not a good idea.

Strangely enough, I used an e-Machines box for a video editing training project about 3 years ago and it worked really well for the basic stuff. I added a 1394 card and built the memory up to 512Mb or maybe 1GB. Captured like a champ and I could use cuts and basic transitions without any real issues. It wasn't all that much slower than my main machine at the time.

You might want to hang on to your eMachine setup after you get your big box back. With an external USB drive, you can capture to it while you're editing on alien. When you're ready for the next project, you can copy in the footage whilst you sleep. I do this all the time.

Just wanted to post a follow-up, I purchased a cord on eBay a while back and it has worked perfectly, I was going to get this one http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=220316077232 but got this instead http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=310084988274

I am puzzled - together with hundreds of others here... The cable you purchased is a USB to USB-mini cable - as far as I can tell from the eBay photo and description.

How did you use it? What did you use it for? To capture video? What format - DV or HDV?

Please elaborate.

To my knowledge there is no way to convert from USB to Firewire just by using a wire with different connectors. I could be wrong, but I'd bet a shiny nickle I'm not.

Looking at the cable+connectors on the left...

I think the idea with that cable is that it provides generic transport.
Need something different? Pop the appropriate adapters on, on BOTH ends.

Need Firewire? Pop a 6 pin FireWire adapter on one end, a 4 pin FireWire adapter on the other, and you're in business to go from computer to camcorder.

Trying to go from USB (computer) to FireWire (camcorder) WILL NOT WORK.
The adapters on both ends of the cable need to be of the same family type. (USB, FireWire, whatever).

Firewire to USB converter for capture?
 

Hello,

I hope someone can help with a solution for this.

I have a Sony PC330E mini DV camera and have been using the iLink (firewire 4pin to 8pin) cable to capture footage into Premier on my Mac.

I have a new PC laptop (Acer Aspire 4736G) wich is soooo much faster than my old battered powerbook but it does not have a Firewire port. To add insult to injury it doesn't have a data card port either.

So, I only have USB ports at my disposal and am at a total loss as to how to capture footage without adding another laptop to my daily trips out on the boat (dive gear, camera, housing, laptops)

I have purchased a little converter which has USB on one end and firewire on the other, however when plugged in through this the camera appears as Unknown Device and capturing is not possible.

Is there another product / drivers / anything I can use to capture?

Thank you all in advance for your thoughts, any ideas will be appreciated.

Kind Regards,
Lubi

In short, no. And I suspect you may not have purchased the best laptop for your needs, either.

If it was a regular PC, I'd suggest buying a firewire card for it. For a laptop, I can only suggest a PCMCIA card such as this one. See if it works for you.

Andrew

How about using a dvd recorder with firewire in and making an mpeg2 then edit that if you use a program that does smart render you will get very good results.