Video Capture on New iMac

[NickM79]

Hi, hopefully I'm not covering old ground! i have just bought an i7 iMac as my P4 PC was struggling with HD footage from my HV30. I have an Avastor 500 gig firewire 400 drive. I have just ordered a firewire 800 to 400 lead for the drive and an 800 to 4 pin lead for the camera to go direct into the iMac. The iMac only has a single 800 firewire socket. I'm using FC Express.

My question is if i connect the hard drive to the iMac with the 400/800 lead, can I connect the HV30 to the hard drive (4 pin to 400) in a daisy chain fashion?

If the iMac sees the camera would it be possible to capture the footage from the HV30 onto the Avastor drive via the iMac? In other words, can the data from the camera go through the firewire chain to the iMac for capture and then go back out to the external hard drive?

Thanks.

[Seo]

Yes, this has been discussed multiple times. Daisy chaining works fine.

[NickM79]

Thanks Seo. So to clarify, I can daisychain the HV30 through the hard drive to the iMac and capture the footage back to the same hard drive at the same time?

Thanks for your help.

[cgbier]

Yep.

[iThinkergoiMac]

FWIW, some people have been experiencing problems with it, so if it doesn't work try connecting the camera directly and see if it does work.

For example, I've never gotten daisy chaining with the camera to work on FW400 drives, but it seems to work fine with FW800 drives for me. Other people have no problems. Others can never get it to work. As always, YMMV.

[Janke]

What brand drives, iThinker? Daisychaining works with Western Digital 1 TB drives...

[iThinkergoiMac]

I know people who have never gotten it to work, though that was always via FW400. I don't actually know anyone directly who hasn't gotten it to work via FW800 when daisychaining...

Honestly, I think it has to do with the Mac more than anything else. The people who have never gotten it to work had older PPC Macs (though it works on my PPC Mac just fine).

[cgbier]

Apple blamed that issue on Canon, Canon on Apple. It never really got resolved.

There is a technical paper about it somewhere on the Apple site.