Firewire 400 or 800?

800 is simply faster and has a different connector, you can use either providing you have either, but whichever you choose it must have the 4 pin connector on one end to plug into the camera.

AFAIK there is no advantage of using 800 over 400 with a video camera since I'm not aware of any cameras that use 800.

6 pin carries power too, whereas the 4 pin is simply data - you'd use the 6 pin when a device needs to be powered too - some external drives use this!

The 6 pin end goes into the mac, the 4 pin to the camera.

Not necessarily . . . I have a Sony VX9000 camera which has a 6 pin input (so that's 6 pin both ends). Just means that it won't power down while I'm importing footage!

Doesn't really matter if you use 6 - 6 or 6 - 4, this will usually be dictated by the equipment you're using to connect to each other. ie: if it needs power it'll have a 6 pin or have some kind of power supply connected, and use a 4 pin for the data transfer.

I've usually found that you get the cable with the equipment anyway, the problems come when you're trying to connect a 400 Firewire to an 800 Firewire (which des work) or other way around, etc., then you have to find adapters, which can be a pain.

Like most computing equipment, if it don't fit (cables & connectors), then it ain't meant to go there! Just take a quick look at plugs and sockets BEFORE you try to force them together and you'll be fine!

Firewire's no different!

The two ends of a 6-pin-to-4-pin FireWire cable look like this:



The big end (6-pin) goes into your Mac, and the small end (4-pin) generally goes into most amateur camcorders which have a FireWire connection. (Many PCs have a small, 4-pin socket instead of the larger 6-pin socket which you find on Macs.)

You don't say which Samsung camcorder you have. Generally, only camcorders which use DV tape have a FireWire connector. Camcorders which have a hard disc inside, or record onto chips, or onto something other than tape, generally have, instead, a USB connection, which is generally smaller and flatter than a FireWire socket, and often looks like this:



That will NOT carry video directly between a camcorder and iMovie, and is generally used for either (a) importing still pictures into a Mac, or (b) copying a video file from a camcorder onto a Mac, and then the video can afterwards - possibly after conversion into a different kind of format - be imported from the Mac's own hard disc into iMovie.

Note that I've never found it possible to import from a camcorder using a 9-pin-to-4-pin FireWire 800 cable ..which looks like this;



There's no advantage using FW 800 ..on a Mac which has a FireWire 800 connection.. because FireWire from a camcorder generally runs at only a quarter the possible full speed of FireWire 400 anyway, and it'll run no faster using FW800.