400 firewire vs 800 firewire

400 should be okay, but you will see a noticeable increase with 800. I would say it depends on how much more they're asking for the 800 port. It also depends on your format of HD, which is...?

I've never worked with one of those, so your best answer is going to come from someone who has (you can search the forums a bit). In general, I would consider the 800 connection, especially if you plan to use multiple streams of video at once from the disk. What drive exactly were you considering?

FYI, quite a few people have had problems trying to use WD MyBook & MyBook Pros on Macs. You can search this forum and find the threads.

I suggest you look at Lacie, G-Technology, Granite Digital, or OWC units. A very nice choice would be an OWC Mercury Elite FW enclosure with a Seagate 7200.10 drive in it, that is, if you're willing to assemble it (not hard at all, as long as you can use a screwdriver) <grin>.

I would second all of this.

I have a G5 1.2 dual . I just bought a 1 to LaCie drive, I hooked the drive via firewire 800. I then set out to use FCE2 with my Canon XL2 hooked via DV capture cable ( firewire). Turned camera to VCR and started up computer, then Final Cut. The program started to load but stalled. I tried to open the new drive folder but it to had slowed down to a craw. I pulled the DV cable from camera and the drive jumped back to life. I also tried opening FCE first and then hooking up camera for capture.which resulted in the program locking up again. Un plugged camera and FCE came back to life again. Is there a problem using firewire drives as a capture drive while using firewire to run the capture drive? Ps I also set the LaCie drive to FW 400 and still the same results. Hooked the out board drive via USB 2 and all is well. Help.

The problem is Canon's implementation of the Firewire protocol. This is a longstanding issue with Canon camcorders. The problem appears when you have both the camcorder and another Firewire device plugged into the same Firewire bus at the same time.

You can solve the problem on your G5 by getting another Firewire card, thereby adding a second Firewire bus. Connect your camcorder to it, and your FW drives to the ports built into your G5.

I have a MacBook Pro 2.4 and the Canon HV20 and just got an external OWC brand quad connect enclosure with a naked Seagate 7200.10 750 GB drive. I installed the drive in the enclosure. I can hook up the camera to the FW 400 port and the OWC drive to the FW800 port and it works beautifully with capture using iMovie '08 and FCE 3.5. Maybe both these ports are on the same bus... but nonetheless it works very well.

Note: the stock OWC external quad elite drive uses a Western Digital drive (don't know if this matters, but I took the recommendation from here to go with the Seagate and installed it myself, it was about $15 more than the OWC pre-assembled offering).

Mace

Thank you for the advice for the Canon Xl2 camera. I moved the Dv cable to another fireware card I have in my G5. That works great now but I hve a different problem now. I'm using FCE HD 3.0 , during capture the capture stalls around 4 to 5 min. I have two internal drives with plenty of room and 2 external firewire drives. The new one is a LaCie 1tb. I've tried using USB from the large drive, Firewire 400 and 800. It does not make a difference to the capture. I've tried most of the changes you can do under preferences, System Settings and Easy Setup. Ive tried to capture on each of the drives and no luck.
I have plenty of ram 4.5 gig. My my machine is a G5 dual 1.2 machine running OS 10.4.11 now. Is their a glitch with the ver. program I have. I have tried to up date it but they send me to buy a new version. I also tried using my sony TRV 11 video camera also. Same story! Any thoughts. Bob

I was concerned about the same and just got the Maxtor One Touch 500 gb external harddrive (7200 rpm) that has 800/400/USB2 options and tried it with my Canon HDV20 and my Macbook Pro using FCE and the (included) 800 Firewire. It works Great! So great, I went out and bought another one. I had also looked at the WD MyBook, but was concerned about some issues folks seemed to have. This setup works fine for me.

Navibob,

Try to capture with iMovie HD 6.0.3 and see if you have the same trouble. I had trouble capturing (similar to as you described) with my old Sony TRV310 with FCE 3.5 and iMovie '08 but it worked just fine with iMovie HD. You can then just move the captured files to wherever on your system and drag into FCE.

To answer the original question of this thread: FW400 vs. FW800 depends a lot on the drive mechanism and primary interface (SATA, eSATA etc.). With lower speed drives and lower end interfaces, there is no difference between FW400 and FW800. YMMV.

Mace

Is this the first time you have had a problem capturing, or have you had problems capturing before?

What is the size, available space & connection of each of your hard drives - your system HD, other internal drives, external drives.

How are each of your external Lacie drives formatted? Are they all Mac OS Extended? Exactly what ports are they connected to. Also your camcorder, what port is it connected to?

Are you running ANY other programs at the same time you are capturing in FCE?

Did you recently update ANY software on your Mac, especially OSX or QuickTime? What did you update/upgrade FROM and TO?

Have you put your Capture Scratch folder in your Spotlight Privacy list in System Preferences? (You should).