USB 2 or Firewire for capturing of camcorder?

what is the best option for video capture from my mini DV camcorder (i have a Panasonic NV DS65)?

I think im using USB2 but getting bad quality(program ULEAD VIDEOSTUDIO 7)

 

Use firewire.
USB sucks, it is suitable only for lowres streaming if even that...

 

It really shouldn't matter, but from my understanding it does sometimes. USB2 (just like USB 1.1) is a shared connection and all devices on the USB port share the same resources and bandwidth. That means, if you are using your mouse and/or keyboard while downloading video, it could cause the video stream to slow down or lose data.

The other reason is Firewire is more widely accepted as the preferred method of downloading video from a digital camcorder. Most video capture software will come with built in support for reading from a DV port. Many camcorders these days only supply you a USB cable and usually so type of special software to enable you to read video from a USB port.

The only issue is that most camcorders don't come with a firewire cable and most PCs don't come with Firewire support. Cable should run about $25 and card should be about $40 -- depending on brand and place of purchase.

 

If you buy a card with a cable bundled with it it is much cheaper. Mine was £15 (UK)

 

Most of the camcorders have USB 1.1 which is 12 Mbits/s whereas Firewire is 480 Mbits/s that is why the obvious choice is to go for Firewire connection.

 

I got a Panasonic NV-DS60 and it has USB2 which I think is alot faster than Firewire for transfering to my PC. USB2 is alot easier to operate and plugin than firewire.

 

firewire is plug and play
USB2 is plug and play, how can it be easier?

 

I plug my cam into a wirless transmitter which has two USB2 connections, that why it is easier for me. The damn Firewire connection is at the back of my PC, only Lian-li could have put 4 usb ports at the front and no firwire ports.

 

Would this be a good time to point out that USB2 is not faster than firewire for transerring DV from the camera to the PC, they both do it at the same speed: realtime.

 

Would this be a good time to point that it is faster on my PC, thats why I use it!

 

Am I to understand that the tape in your camcorder rotates faster than realtime for the transfer to the PC?

 

I'm not sure about the realtime issue with firewire. It seems like it transfers slightly faster than realtime on my system using Studio, but it might be just the "preview" screen streaming the video just looks deceptively faster. Either way, it's not that much different than realtime even if it is faster. Basically, 60 minute take will take me just under 60 minutes to transfer to the PC.

 

anything faster than realtime would require the tape to turn faster than 1x. Whilst I'm not ruling this out, it seems unlikely.
To have it turn slightly faster than 1x to bring the 60 minute transfer in at just under 60 minutes seems even more unlikely.

 

does It matter that i have a MSI motherboard. because some guy told me that it might not be compatable. And that i needed a INTEL motherboard and that will fix it.

what motherboards do you have and are u using USB or FIREWIRE and are you getting good quality video

THX

 

does It matter that i have a MSI motherboard. because some guy told me that it might not be compatable. And that i needed a INTEL motherboard and that will fix it.

what motherboards do you have and are u using USB or FIREWIRE and are you getting good quality video ?

THX

 

I have MSI with AMD XP and I'm using firewire.
It works like a dream. I also have P4 laptop with firewire and it also works as good as the AMD machine. I use same external Firewire AV dedicated storage in both systems.
Firewire has worked every system I have ever tested that had proper OS installed (W98SE/W2K/XP).

 

The motherboard is irrelevant.

The capture via Firewire should be flawless.
I suspect that you are capturing in mpeg
You need to capture in AVI

 

I have a panasonic pv-dv203-k. It will not capture video on usb2 it fails every time. I was told that you can't use usb. it has to be firewire. I have a firewire port, but was wondering if it was necessary to get a video capture card. I already have a geforce fx.

 

If it's a DV camera (and the name suggests that it is) then all you need is a firewire cable from camcorder to firewire card.

 

I got a firewire cable, and I can capture now, but for some reason I'm dropping a lot of frames. I've tried several different software and I always get the same results. I end up with less than half the frames I should have. Some suggestions or advice please.