Capturing DV on Apple PowerBook to External FireWire Drive?

[Timekeeper]

Question:

The 17 inch Apple PowerBook (1.5 GHz) has 2 USB ports and 1 Apple FireWire port (6 pin) and 1 iLink (Sony style) port (4 pin).

If I connect a DV cam to the PowerBook via Apple FireWire for capturing video, that does not leave any more Apple FireWire ports available for an external hard drive. If I can't save directly to an external drive (scratch disk), then I am limited to the amount of hard drive space available on the internal disk.

Does anyone have any suggestions for capturing DV directly to an external drive so that the user is not limited to the small amount of space available on the internal drive?

If a user connects the DV cam to the iLink (4 pin) and a external drive to the Apple FireWire (6 pin), could they then capture directly to that external as a scratch disk?

Thanks,

Timekeeper

 

[mickhyperion]

I can't really answer your question, but I have a suggestion for a workaround. If you use iMovie to capture the video to your Powerbook's hard drive, it will break the video into individual clips each time you pressed pause during the original recording process. As long as you're not just capturing one long clip, you might be able to get away with capturing portions then stop and transfer them to your external drive, repeating until you get them all captured and transferred, then refamiliarize iMovie (or whatever video editor) with the new location of all the clips.

Hope that helps!

 

[PhotoDave219]

Thats the easiest, only capture small amounts of DV and them move to a drive.

OR.... buy a firewire card for a PCIMCA slot.