Posted by Dave Martindale on 01/18/08 19:45

dj_nme <dj_nme@iinet.net.au> writes:

>On a video camera, the USB port is usually used primarily for
>downloading still images (usually stored on an SD card) just like an
>ordinary stills camera, this doesn't have to worry about the portion of
>tape with the data passing by the read heads (be it magnetic for DV cams
>or optical for DVD cams) before transport protocol has had time to
>tranfer it to the camera.
>The problem is that most camcorders will only have a USB 1.1 (or USB 1,
>which is even slower) port, which is considerably slower than FireWire.

Even when DV cameras *do* have a USB2 port which they use to transfer
still images at high speed to a computer, they generally just do not
have firmware support for transferring the DV video data over USB2 -
even though USB2 is plenty fast enough for the 25 Mbit/s DV data rate.

I happen to own a Canon Optura 60, which is one of the few DV cameras
that can transfer full video data over USB2. But it requires special
software on the computer end, and the software only works under some
versions of Windows, and it's not clear whether you can use the editing
program of your choice to capture the data even then. In comparision,
every DV camera provides a Firewire port that will do data transfer as
well as providing some amount of remote device control, and essentially
every editing program supports capture via Firewire. So that's the way
to go, even with a camera that theoretically supports USB2 as well.

My former computer was old enough that I had to buy a Firewire interface
card for it. But anything you buy today will probably have a Firewire
port or two on the motherboard.

Dave

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