Firewire cable for camcorder?

Question

I have a canon hv20. I really feel like doing some video editing with some footage i have, but have not gotten the chance to get a firewire cable. What kind of firewire cable do i need to get? I use a macbook pro which has the attachments to 400mps and 800mps i believe. is the 800mps really that much faster? If i just went to walmart right now since there open 24/7 would they have good firewire cables, or shouild i wait and go to a more reliable place like circut city tomorrow

Answer 1

The firewire 400 and 800 CABLE might be the same, but the ENDS are different.

To connect your HV20 to your MacBook, you need a 4-pin (camcorder DV port) to 6-pin (MacBook firewire400 port) cable.

The bottleneck will not be the protocol transfer speed. It will be the CPU doing the HD import. Using Firewire800 will not help the speed.

Importing miniDV video (whether DV or HDV) is a "real-time" activity - whether you are using iMovieHD or FinalCut (Express or Pro). It is not like copying data files from a hard drive or flash-memory based camcorder.

My guess is that Walmart would more likely have a 4-pin to 6-pin firewire cable because they are pretty common... Firewire800 is typically used for high-speed hard drive arrays, and I would guess that neither Walmart nor Circuit City has them... Maybe Fry's Electronics or something more along those lines...

And honestly, I don't even know if iMovieHD or FinalCut will even recognize that there is a DV port on the other side of the Firewire 800 port... I need to check that out...

Answer 2

Firewire cable is the same for both 400 and 800 firewire ports. The difference is inside in the chip set which makes possible higher transfer. And yes, 800 is faster.

It does not really matter where you buy the cable. If you really want, you can get one with golden connectors, but any will do. Easy get it in Wal-mart, nothing wrong with their cables. It only depends how much money you wanna spend:-)

By the way, since your cam is miniDV, it transfers the video via firewire while PLAYING - does not matter whether you have firewire 400 or 800, it will ALWAYS take one hour to transfer one hour tape.

The difference betw. FW400 and 800 you will see, if you try to transfer the videofile (which is 12-13 GB per one miniDV tape) between two computers via firewire.