Firewire card

[jlynch]

I just bought a sony trv 25e mini-dv camcorder this weekend.

I want to be able to transfer the contents of my mini-dv tape onto my computer via the dv-out connection on my camcorder.

I presume I will need a firewire card and a FireWire IEEE1394 Plug 4/6 cable as well.

I have seen a Tekram PCI firewire card with 3 interfaces that is really cheap and has the cable with it as well as MGI editing software. It is 30 euro in Ireland.

I would like to hear from anyone who has one of these cards or from anyone who could point me towards better firewire cards
.

[Navellint]

hi,
i did practically the same last week and it worked out fine. I don't know anything about the firewire you are about to buy though.
- bought soundblaster 1394 (OEM) €85 incl 1x firewire connector
- MGI Videowave III came with the camera Canon xm1 (miniDV)
- the firewire-cable also came with the camera (has two different plugs 4/6)
- when you start Videowave, you'll be able to start/stop the camera from the program
- this combination enabled me to capture video+sound through the firewire connector of soundblaster at full res, although i have a simple p3 @450 MHz and udma66 controller
- FAT32 takes 4 GB at a time, NTFS takes supports unlimited filesize
- Pinnacle Studio 7 came with my Philips dvd+rw and works as well
- TMPG 2.58 encoded and deinterlaced the 22GB avi to 4GB mpeg-2 dvd-compliant (M2V+MP2)
- now i'm making a dvd (Scenarist) of the 92 min of video and stillshow as well on a 4400 MB dvd+r

Somebody (padre) pointed this out for me, so maybe you can do something with this information too. He also pointed out that it is easier (and better quality) to copy VHS to miniDV and then capture digitally, than it is to capture analog through video-in. That gave me some ideas.
BTW, why would you need 3 interfaces?
GL, HF and CU

[theReal]

I've tried 3 FireWire cards so far and they were all no-name products for not much money. The one I'm using in my computer now cost about 20 Euro and came with one cable and VideoStudio 5 (that I don't need, but whatever...)

All of these cards were working fine and without any problems in different computers - so there's a very big chance you won't have any problems with yours, too :)