firewire

firewire or ieee1394 is a pc interface standard. unlike the more popular usb, firewire offers high speed communication and isochronous data transmission hence, ideal for transfer large volumes of data. the developer of this technology, apple, called this standard firewire and the tag has remained. other manufacturers have their own tags though like sony, which calls their ieee1394 as i.link.

why blog about firewire?

we finally got one! 🙂

what for? to transfer digital videos to our pc for editing.

despite the proliferation of dvd camcorders and hdd camcorders, mini-dv still gives the best video recording quality. yes, those small tapes do pack a punch. those professional cameras wedding videographers use, they all use mini-dv (well, with the exception of very few like the p2 card of the hvx… but that’s a totally new technology and i only know one who uses it. 😉). because of the quality… and security in archiving. but how do you transfer video from tape to a pc? do you use a usb? years back, i thought that was the way. who can fault me? eh, yun ang kasamang cord ng biniling kong videocam, eh. plus, yun din nasa instruction manual. kaya pala pag transfer ko sa pc, eh sobrang pixelated yung video. because usb cannot handle such vast amount of data at high speeds, continuously. later on, i learned about firewire.

we made sure that our new pc had firewire ports. unlike usb ports, firewire ports does not come standard. now we got a pc with firewire ports. we have a videocam (jurassic as it may be. 😆). all we needed was the firewire cable.

this past weekend, we got hold of one. 🙂

pagkadating sa bahay, we immediately brought out our must-be-replaced-videocam and plugged it into our pc using the newly acquired firewire cable. we have read that there was a problem transferring video files using firewire in vista. kaya naman we were a bit nervous too that all those complaints may be true. but lo-and-behold, we got to transfer the video easily. after transfer, i played it and it had audio (another complaint against vista). opened vegas and started dragging and dropping frames and it worked! woohoo!

ayun lang. time to make a honeymoon video… 😉