I have just bought a Sony camcorder which comes with both USB and
firewire.

I was under the impression that I could only transfer lower quality
video over USB, but I seem to be able to stream USB to an AVI file and
produce a 1GB file for just 3 mins of video (compared to MUCH smaller
wmv or mpg)

....does this mean that I am getting full quality video transfer via
USB?

If firewire will give me much higher quality then presumably the file
will be much larger which is a worry since 20GB/hour is quite a large
file!

I am assuming that AVI is the correct (best quality) format to transfer
video in?


Thanks for any help

David Bevan
http://www.davidbevan.co.uk

David wrote ...
Maybe.  Maybe you have a new generation of camcorder that
uses USB2 to transfer DV video. 

It would have been extraordinarily helpful if you had mentioned
the model number. Otherwise we will just dance around making
wild speculations. Some of the speculations will likely cause
more confusion than enlightenment.  That is the nature of Usenet
newsgroups where we are separated in time and space.

DV25 uses 13.6GB/hour. But hard drive space is quite inexpensive
and you need the space only for the duration of the editing session,
so why is that a problem?

Yes, but. To be more precise, the video is most likely being
transfered as "DV25", and your computer application is
drpping the DV25 bitstream (unchanged) into an AVI container
file. You could just as easily put exactly the same DV bitstream
into a MOV file (or perhaps even others)

Your choice is what to do with the DV25 bitstream as
it enters your computer (whether by Firewire or USB2).
Saving it unchanged (in AVI or MOV) is far preferable
to immediately compressing it into MPEG, DIVX, etc.

---snip---
It would have been extraordinarily helpful if you had mentioned
the model number.
---snip---
Yes, sorry, its DCR-HC19E

Thanks

David Bevan
http://www.davidbevan.co.uk

Firewire. If you want further confirmation of this, read back through the
rec.video heirarchy.
We've had huge discussions about this over the last three weeks.

USB2 ON PAPER, is THEORETICALLY fast enough to do the transfer.

"The difference between reality and theory is, In theory, there's no
difference between the two."

Please read the past threads.

C.j

<ju***@davidbevan.co.uk> wrote in message
Show quoteHide quote

USB2 and Firewire are both many times faster than what a single DV25
stream needs.

Firewire has the advantage that a device can reserve a certain amount of
bandwidth and then be guaranteed it.  It also has the advantage that you
probably have no other Firewire devices connected, or at worst one
Firewire disk, while you might have all sorts of junk plugged into USB
and competing for controller time.

But a USB2 port on its own controller, not shared with other
concurrently-operating devices, has lots more bandwidth than you need
too.

    Dave

Sure, it's got the bandwidth.

There are a lot of other factors to consider, like if the software being
used to capture/transfer is designed to play nice with USB2.

Like I said, reality versus theory. If your time is money - or at least
valuable to you - and you have the option of using Firewire or USB2, use
firewire. It'll more than likely "just work" where USB2 is a crapshoot.

C.


Show quoteHide quote

I highly suggest you use the firewire
port.  As mentioned above, usb is
still real iffy.  As far as format goes,
you need to figure out what software
to use once you do import video.  I
use premiere pro, so avi is definately
the way to go.   If you can dedicate a
hard drive for video, you'll be better off.
If you physically have room in your box,
try putting in a security drawer for your
hard drive.  That way when you fill a
120 gig drive, you can just swap your
drive for a new one.  Hard drives are
so cheap now.  It sounds like you're
already playing the gigabyte game.
Where do I stick these huge files?  Be
carefull before buying that slick exterior
firewire drive.  I've found that there
great for storage, but I can't capture
straight to the drive without losing frames.

Good luck in videoville.
joe schmitt
at will produtions

<ju***@davidbevan.co.uk> wrote in message
Show quoteHide quoteAVI is nothing more than a wrapper -- what matters is the codec.  miniDV
should be captured with a DV-codec (usually Microsoft, but Panasonic has a
decent one as well).  The data rather for dv-codec-encoded AVI is
approximately 13.7 gigabytes per hour of video.

USB is theoretically capable of capturing DV-25 video (the digital standard
used for miniDV).  However, most software expects to find digital video
transfers coming through a 1394/Firewire port -- it was a standard adopted
by camera manufacturers when USB 1.0 wasn't capable of the sustained
transfer speed needed.

There's far too little information from your post to determine either what
you're doing, or what you want to do .  However, if you're concerned with
maintaining the highest video quality, the software that will support it
will expect to see video on the 1394 port, not the USB port.

Show quoteHide quote

Thanks for everyones advise!

I got myself a firewire cable, but the AVI file that gets transfered
from the camera is still the same size and quality as the one that I
got via USB!

....It has got some advantages though, I can now control the camcorder
from the editing software which makes things easier and MSMM now gives
me the DV-AVI option where as previously I was having to transfer it
using one bit of software and then import it into MSMM.

Thanks

David Bevan
http://www.davidbevan.co.uk

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