Firewire connection question

I have had some problems outputting from my external g-tech firewire800 harddrive. It has hiccops, skips, or what ever you want to call it while coping back to tape via firewire400 port.

I asked this question a while back and was told to try and move the footage to internal drive and then output, because there is only one bus for the firewire. That works great. No problems then.

Now I have a project larger than my internal drive will handle so I need to get this external drive working without hiccups. And I need some advice.

What would work best for me now, cost and such, is to buy a firewire400 addon card to capture to the external firewire800 drive. The FW800 drive will be hooked up to computer via FW800 cable and stock FW800 port. The camera will be hooked to computer via FW400 addon card.
Does this setup sound like a good working setup?
Footage is DV. But trying to look ahead at HDV also.

Thanks for any advice
Bret

i have heard of thermal issues with some gtech drives. that could be the culprit... in which case you may be hosed.

Anything else on that FW Bus? Because anything else on the same FW bus and the NEW G-Raids slow down considerably.


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To drop the other shoe, you can buy a FireWire card for pretty cheap to get more ports that don't interfere with the FireWire connections inside the Mac. That is the recommended way to run external storage *and* a deck or camcorder at the same time with great success. All our machines have at least one FireWire card and one machine has two.

You also need to know that you can't connect a 400 device at the same time as an 800 device without problems unless you add hardware. In general the faster of the two slows down to match the slower. There's only one chipset inside the Mac to run all the built-in connections, and it's easily confused.

Koz

Kozikowski Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You also need to know that you can't connect a 400
> device at the same time as an 800 device without
> problems unless you add hardware. In general the
> faster of the two slows down to match the slower.
> There's only one chipset inside the Mac to run all
> the built-in connections, and it's easily
> confused.
>
> Koz


I have a dual 2.7 G5 and I connect a pocket drive to the FW400 port on the front and a FW800 drive on the back and I copy files all the time with no problems. Although it does seem that it's only running at FW400 speed but that should be obvious because FW400 can't go any faster. Are you referring to specific Macs that have problems and only problems in Final Cut?

I have heard that G4's and older G5's with FW800 only run at FW400 speed anyway. don't know if that's true though. I have never seen blazing fast transfer speeds from my G4 or G5 FW800 copying to an internal drive, so maybe it is?

<<<I copy files all the time with no problems.>>>

I agree. You can also do that with multiple daisy-chained FireWire drives. Copying files has never been a problem because the operating system has time to sit and wait.

Live television doesn't work like that. Video is streaming and there is a frame right after this one and another... Any time you ask the build-in FireWire ports to do more than one thing, your chance of error goes up. The more rules of thumb you violate, the further up until you start getting instabilities and damage.

We didn't have time to stop and troubleshoot stuttering frames and sound sync problems, so we went with the FireWire cards pretty much from the start.

It worked.

Koz

Yes. Thats the problem I think. I have a FW800 harddrive hooked to the computer along with a DV deck hooked to the FW400 port. My thinking is to add a FW PCI card to have the DV deck connected to.

Bret

Get an 800 card so you can put the drive in the back and the camcorder in the front.

Koz