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Raaka Unregistered guest | I have just bought a Panasonic PV-GS65 Mini DV player. Browsing through this forum, Firewire seems to be the obvious choice over USB, but why? Will Firewire work on any operating system? How does it work exactly (card, port..?)and what will I need to buy? We just upgraded to this camcorder after 7 years with a large, outdated model, so I have no idea how any of this works. Please help me! |
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Silver Member Username: GromitPost Number: 315 Registered: Mar-05 | Firewire was designed with DV transfer in mind - at that time there weren't any other interfaces available with sufficient performance. It transfers the video into your computer with NO loss of quality. These days, USB is fast enough to support DV transfer, but firewire is already well-established as the main standard to use. Normally, USB is used for transferring stills, webcam streaming, and transferring sub-DV quality video clips. Most cameras will only transfer full quality DV over firewire. Some purists will also claim that firewire is more elegantly designed for efficient high-speed transfer, but that is a quite esoteric engineering discussion. The short answer is: if your camcorder supports DV, consider yourself lucky and definitely use it rather than USB. If your computer doesn't already have a firewire port, buy a PCI (or PCMCIA) card, preferably one packaged with cable and software. They are very cheap ($20 approx). By the way, make sure your PC meets the system specs specified by the firewire card or you may drop frames while transferring the video. For software to transfer video to your PC, I'll recommend Roxio VideoWave, Ulead VideoStudio, or the free application Windows Moviemaker supplied as part of XP. My own favourite is Videowave for reliability and ease of use. For DVD authoring software, my recommendation is Ulead MoveiFactory, which to my amateur eye seems to give the best quality in the finished result. It might not be the fastest programme for processing, though. If your PC is quite fast, this shouldn't bother you too much. Just FYI, the basic steps of making home DVDs are: 1) connect the camera using firewire (you only need to buy a card if your PC is not already equipped with firewire ports) and capture the raw footage 2) edit the raw footage into useable video clips 3) drag and drop the clips into a DVD authoring package and burn the DVD You can check out this guide for assistance on using Ulead VideoStudio to transfer video from your camcorder to your PC: http://www.jonesgroup.net/media/videostudiodvcaptureone.htm A lot of the information in the above guide is superfluous though - if you just read the first and last pages you probably have enough to get you started. Hope that helps. |