Confused About Firewire Cards and Transfer Rate

railroadguy · Post by **railroadguy** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 2:40 am

Buying a Canopus advc300 and need a pci to firewire card. Well, there are a lot of them =-O

The question I see in specs, some cards have Data Transfer Rate: 400/200/100 Mbps while others are Data Transfer Rate: 800/400/200/100 Mbps.

What is needed for video transfer. Some reading I do says 400 Mbps is fine, but human nature says more is better, so what's with the 800 Mbps?

We are talking less then $40 bucks (US) here so it's not a bug deal, just confused.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 4:09 am

The higher transfer rate (800 mbps etc) is Firewire 2 -- rather like USB 2.0 only faster.

The other is the original Firewire which has a maximum transfer rate of 400 Mbps. This is more than enough for transmission of DV video, which I think runs at about 25 mbps...

You would only need the Firewire 2 if you were running a firewire network and wanted something really fast...

But as you say, it's all cheap these days, so why not?!

maddrummer3301 · Post by **maddrummer3301** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 4:30 am

skier-hughes · Post by **skier-hughes** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 10:26 am

And if you have an 800 firewire card any hardware rated at 100 will not suddenly work faster.
What you would be doing is slightly future proofing yourself if you buy an firewire 800 products, which to be honest are few and far between, mainly as video moves from tape to solid state.
800 also uses a 9 pin connection, so you'd need 9-4 pin leads for dv.

Graham

railroadguy · Post by **railroadguy** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 3:47 pm

Thank you all for the help and information.
I did not know about the 9 pin lead on the high speed firewire.

tyamada · Post by **tyamada** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 4:03 pm

There are no DV/HDV camcorders that use data rates above 25K that I know of. I have a Firewire 800 card and the only devices that can use the 800 speed are hard drives and CD ROM/DVD drives mounted in a Firewire 800 external case. It works great if you want to use a 16X DVD writer at full speed externaly.

Even using a adapter from 9pin to 4pin to capture video will only yield the data rate of the camera which is far below 800Kbps

Most Firewire 800 cards come with one(1) 1394a (standard firewire) port and two or more firewire 800 ports, so it can be used for standard camcorder without a 9pin to 4pin adapter.

maddrummer3301 · Post by **maddrummer3301** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 6:33 pm

railroadguy · Post by **railroadguy** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 8:20 pm

Well, I ordered all the equipment from Newegg. We shall see this weekend how everything works

Post by **Ron P.** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 8:34 pm

So you gave Newegg my correct address didn't you? I mean I think we need to try this stuff out first so we can make sure they are providing you with the proper equipment...

railroadguy · Post by **railroadguy** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 8:39 pm

Well, had I known.... it is shipping from California and you are between them and me. If you only spoke up sooner

Post by **Ron P.** » Tue Jan 30, 2007 8:41 pm

Dummy me, I thought that you were getting it from N.Y. so didn't want to add to the shipping...