Hi! My friend recently bought a notebook he intends to use for some of his home video editing. Unfortunately after he opens the box there is no firewire port on the notebook instead he has 4 usb ports. I tried suggesting that he buys a pcmcia card for the firewire unfortunately again there is no pcmcia socket in his notebook. How can we get around this? Is there any other way he can connect his videocam to the laptop using firewire?:lol:

How about connect it through usb?

Well, it can be connected but the speed of USB vs Firewire is very significant.

siting from this source: http://www.qimaging.com/support/down...irewireUSB.pdf one can see that the only thing you will be using it for is reading data from teh camcorder, so it would be read speed. The read speed of usb 2.0 actually obtains 33 mb/s while firewire obtains 38 mb/s. Thats about 13% difference. While different, its not a huge difference. Is 100 minutes of transfer really that much different than 113 minutes?

Thanks for the info. I really appreciate your help but after checking the video cam the only connection that allows streaming is the firewire port. It has a USB though but it can only capture the data in the memory card and not in the film.

Yeah, i dont know exactly what to tell you. I have looked all over the net for an adapter but with no avail. I'm under the impression that they communicate under two different ways.