What is............firewire?

Question

every camcorder that i have looked at....well, MOST i have looked at says it has FIREWIRE instead of USB cord to connect to your computer....what is FIREWIRE???

Answer 1

its a diffrent type of usb, diffrent size, speciallized for camcorders

Answer 2

another type of high speed cable.  A few years ago they were more common with Macs.

Now you will see them between both PC formats.  Though I've been out of the game for a while, I think USB2 was faster or at least comparable.

My camcorder came with both formats firewire and usb.

If your computer does not have it you can buy an upgrade card from a computer, or office supply store.  Many of them have USB and Firewire ports.

Edit: Laptop?  That other port if it looks like usb but isn't then it is probably Firewire :D  

If you don't have one on your laptop you will need to buy one that plugs into the PCMCIA port.  That wide card looking port on the side of the laptop.

Answer 3

simple version: it is like your usb, but has more bandwidth to send the large amount of data that video requires.  

complex answer:  http://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia_term/0...

Answer 4

It's a kind of protocol for serial communications, similar to USB (it's not the same as USB or they would've called it USB also instead of Firewire).

It's not only used in cameras, but external hard drives, printers, etc....

Answer 5

It's another data bus, rather like USB.  It's about the same speed as USB 2, but it has a way of working that guarantees that the data transfer won't be interrupted - important if you're capturing video from tape.

In practical terms it probably means you'll need to add a firewire card to your PC.  They're cheap, easy to install and readily available.

<edit>

Yes, you just plug the camcorder in the same way you'd connect a USB device.  Since you've got a laptop, make sure you know whether it uses PCMCIA or Express cards - you can get Firewire cards for either but they're not interchangeable.