multidiscipline
Registered
The situation:
We have just got a new MBP 15" with firewire 800 port.
We also have a Canon XM1 video camera which has a firewire 400 port.
We also need to get an external firewire hard drive of somewhere between 500GB and 1TB for both video capture and timemachine backup (which we will probably partition for this reason).
We will be using Final Cut Pro as the video editing software.
Research:
I've been reading so many mixed and confusing reviews about converter cables (800 to 400) and the ensuing data flow problems coming from this type of adapter solution that I decided to look to find an external hard drive with actual ports for both 400 and 800 cables. This would allow us to connect the camera to the hard drive using a 400 cable, and then the hard drive to the MBP using an 800 cable.
Problems:
We obviously need to plug the video camera into the hard drive anyway, however there are few external hard drives still out there with both 400 and 800 firewire ports (rather than 2 x 800 firewire with a 800-400 firewire adapter cable!).
But the LaCie drives seem to have poor reliability according to many online reports, and the Western Digital drives are problematic because of the eco shut down (after 10 minutes of inactivity) which results in dropped frames when capturing video (or some similar problem, so far as I can define).
A solution?:
Basically, I'm completely foxed by this now. Can anyone suggest a solution for this situation? It's rather frustrating that Apple have decided to remove the firewire 400 port from the latest MBP, but we hope that there's a good solution out there. Look forward to hearing from you!
We have just got a new MBP 15" with firewire 800 port.
We also have a Canon XM1 video camera which has a firewire 400 port.
We also need to get an external firewire hard drive of somewhere between 500GB and 1TB for both video capture and timemachine backup (which we will probably partition for this reason).
We will be using Final Cut Pro as the video editing software.
Research:
I've been reading so many mixed and confusing reviews about converter cables (800 to 400) and the ensuing data flow problems coming from this type of adapter solution that I decided to look to find an external hard drive with actual ports for both 400 and 800 cables. This would allow us to connect the camera to the hard drive using a 400 cable, and then the hard drive to the MBP using an 800 cable.
Problems:
We obviously need to plug the video camera into the hard drive anyway, however there are few external hard drives still out there with both 400 and 800 firewire ports (rather than 2 x 800 firewire with a 800-400 firewire adapter cable!).
But the LaCie drives seem to have poor reliability according to many online reports, and the Western Digital drives are problematic because of the eco shut down (after 10 minutes of inactivity) which results in dropped frames when capturing video (or some similar problem, so far as I can define).
A solution?:
Basically, I'm completely foxed by this now. Can anyone suggest a solution for this situation? It's rather frustrating that Apple have decided to remove the firewire 400 port from the latest MBP, but we hope that there's a good solution out there. Look forward to hearing from you!
