how to transfer video to laptop 2

[tatika]

I have a jvc digital camcorder that I would like to transfer the movie I recorded to my laptop.
I am not sure what hardware I really need. My goal is to transfer video and audio to the laptop for editing, but I don't have a fireware port.
Is there a way to connect a firewire cable onto the usb port?

Thanks in advance
My laptop is a dell latitude w/usb, parallel, serial ports.

 

[micker377]

There are USB kits to copy to the hard drive. They may have to be USB 2. The other question is how much hard drive you have. Video takes megs of space.

 

[tatika]

I only have 14 gb of available disk space and not usb 2 compatible.
Is there a way to convert the usb ports in order to work?

 

[micker377]

How old is the laptop? Do they make a PMCIA firewire port card for your computer? Depending on type of video compression 14 gig may not be a very long movie! Do a google search of "Video" sites to get information on recording video to see if your computer is usable for this. I understand TIVO and other video recorders have 20 and 30 gig hard drives and everybody is screaming for more. I have some video files (friend took on vacation)- 20 seconds is 1.76

 

[micker377]

(cont., hit wrong button, just did 6hrs. yard work)
20 seconds of video is 1.76 meg of file (asf file). 10 second mpg is 1 meg. How long is your movie?

 

[bigbrownbuku]

the answer to your first question is no. firewire and usb are different. secondly the files transfered from your mini dv will be huge. especially if you want any kind of quality.
you can render different codecs later depending on the type of quality you want, this also takes a long time.

 

[micker377]

Just down at Fry's Electronics yesterday and saw a FireWire PMCIA card for $40.00. We are still back to "small" hard drive.

 

[tatika]

Thank you guys for all the responses.
My option, indeed, is a PMCIA. I found some good brands and prices. As far as the size of the movie I like to transfer it is huge. That is another issue I could solve by probably getting an external hard drive.

Thanks again

 

[norty303]

At this point I personnally would be looking at the cost of the PMCIA card and the external drive (which would really want to be on USB2 for effective use) and thinking how much more would it be to get a laptop with firewire and a large drive..... How much is your existing laptop worth as trade in/private sale plus the $40 firewire plus the $? for external drive.

Video editing is very processor intensive especially when applying fx and encoding for compression etc. Every extra clock cycle you can lay your hands on will show real world results in terms of time taken to complete the task. Also bottlenecks like slow connections to drives (USB1.1) will also hamstring your pc as the processor will be waiting constantly for data.

 

[cdogg]

Well, if you go with a firewire PCMCIA card, then you could also purchase an external firewire hard drive. There's no need to also upgrade to USB 2.0 just for the hard drive.


~cdogg
[tab]"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind";
[tab][tab]- Aristotle
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[tatika]

thanks you all
I'll consider my options. All the editing I need will be transfered to vhs or cd. I'll not keep anything on the hard drive once it is transferred.