Firewire on digital camcorder to laptop

While not cheap, I decided to go with this: Pinnacle Studio MovieBox. Works like a charm.

Thank you all for your input. It was very helpful.

You dont need 5 gigabits of bandwidth of usb 3 for simple video streaming. Usb 2 provides 480 megabits. If it's not working over usb 2 the bottleneck lies elsewhere.

If you look into the USB port there will be a plastic bar that runs across the top and then the connection slot is on the bottom. The color of that plastic bar on a USB 3 plug or socket will be blue. And SS USB IS a USB 3.0 port so you are good with that port on your laptop for USB 3.

Best Buy has a couple of capture devices that will do the job. I bought The Dazzle unit. It comes with Pinnacle software and worked okay the only time I have used it. It cost about $60.
There was at least one more brand available at BestBuy - Roxio maybe? - that had a Firewire input but it wasn't clear that it had it and I found out later it did.

wa8yxm wrote:
Does it have a BLUE USB port?

None of the ports on my laptop are color coded. I have 2 that are just labelled with the usb symbol. I have one that has "SS" in front of the usb symbol. My research says that is a "super speed" usb, aka a usb 3.

YC 1 wrote:
Do a little research on this device and you probably can find a used one on Ebay

That looks interesting. I am also looking at this Pinnacle Studio MovieBox. Yours costs a lot less though.

Ebay

Do a little research on this device and you probably can find a used one on Ebay. The box will let you record directly to the DVD and then you can toss that into your computer to do editing. DVD editing of long projects can be very time consuming and frustrating without a smoking fast computer. If these are vacation movies you can just transfer them with the box and play them with any dvd player. Just FF past any sections you don't want to watch. Once you have a single copy of the transferred video you can use a program to make multiple copies for family and friends.

Does it have a BLUE USB port? If so you can get a dongle that converts it to Firewire, Even the black ports may be able to do the job. (USB 2 minimum)

USB (2.0 is plenty) to express card and then an express card 1394 adapter. Your hard drive might not keep up with a 20+ mbps MPEG stream, consider an ssd if you don't have one already.

It is a Sony DCR-HC21. Since the tape must play at its record speed, real time capture is all I can hope for. There is no mass storage retrieval from the camcorder.

Everything I have read says that those Firewire to USB cables are a waste of money.

My computer does have a "SS-USB" port that I understand is USB 3.

I don't really care that the download is in real time. I can start the playback/capture and go do something else. I just need a way for the computer to see/accept the data stream from the camcorder.

Bobbo wrote:
I have a digital camcorder with a firewire output and want to download the video to my laptop computer to burn to DVD. The computer does not have a firewire port, a PCIe slot, or an expresscard slot.

What are my options?

What camera are you using? The firewire port might not be as useful as you hope... on my Hi-8 Sony Handycam, the firewire port only outputs video in real-time. It was intended to interface the camera with an editing deck, so the tape transport controls, video and audio were over a single cable.

My JVC FHD harddrive camera is the same way, video over the firewire is real-time but the USB port provides both real-time streaming and mass-storage mode, for faster downloads.