high-definition and firewire, usb

Hi,

as long as your are transfering files (videos that are already encoded) from your internal HD to the external HD, then there would be no loss of quality.
Because it's only copying you do.

When you try to encode on the fly to external HDs, then there could be a loss, because of the lower throughput.

Regards

Stefan

the second part is not true. On paper usb 2.0 is faster than firewire 400. You would have to refer to your individual cameras manual for that answer.

While 'on paper' the maximum speed of USB 2.0 high speed is faster than firewire 400 (480MBps vs 400MBps), anyone who has compared the two with appropriately similar hardware knows that firewire is actually more efficient.

It has to do with the amount of logic overhead in the protocol. USB has a lot of logic going on that takes up part of that bandwidth (I'm not sure if it has to do with the amount of devices it has to be prepared for, or just non-efficient protocol practices).

The firewire protocol is very streamlined for sending large amounts of data back and forth. So when you have a choice between the two for large bandwidth transfers, firewire is always a safer choice.

Hi all,

just for clarification:

I meant the difference in speed between internal and external drives, not between USB and FireWire.

Stefan

Well, there is a potential issue with that as well. You want to avoid streaming audio/video to the system drive whenever possible as due to OS, Applications, and caching that drive is doing a lot of stuff that could supersede the video stream.

You can use internal drives, but since we are talking in a Macbook forum you can't have a non-system internal drive unless your booting externally, which would be a bit odd. As such your best bet would be an external drive for that, as long as there is enough bandwidth, so raw HD streams would definitely be out, but MPEG2/4 streams would be fine, as well as HDV IIR.

as of late I don't think that argument is as valid as it use to be atleast in my recent experiences. Pretty neck to neck. Could be the individual device, the macbook... (In terms of data transfer, not streaming). I wish i had a 800 input and could put that to work.

Wouldn't you lose frames b4 you lose quality?

since it is 1's and 0's (u are transferring not streaming) u are not losing any quality)

Losing frames would be losing quality. You would have dropouts in your video stream.

Although since we are not talking about raw video, more likely HDV or MPEG Streams, there are not discreet frames for every frame in the original captured video, rather full frames every so often, then a number of frames that are made up of the differences from frames before/after it. In this case as you lose bits you can see some general degradation of the video stream rather than just a single lost frame or parts of a single frame.

If there is a hole in a frame, and the next 5 frames reference back to it just as changes, that hole will be carried through for those 5 frames.

if you lost frames you would stop the capture and fix the problem. So it would not be an issue