Curiously,

Is there an advantage to putting the faster card in ones computer for working in HDV?

Is there even a cable to run from the camera in this type?

thank you.

As far as I know, there is no advantage to use the kind of setup you suggest here Dale!

HDV 1080i50/60 streams in 25mbps, HDV 720p streams in 19 mbps.
Firewire 400 (IEEE 1394) is designed to support data transfer rates up to 400 mbps! As you can see there should be more than enough headroom in the FW400 stream.
Also to use a FW800 connection you have to use an adapter to attach the original 4 or 6 pins FW400 cable from your camcorder.

I think you´ll be better off if you invest in more RAM and HDD spinning at 7200 rpm or faster. And don´t put the HDD more than 60-70% full if you´ll stay out of trouble.

Per Johan,

Thanks, that is exactly what I wanted to know!!!

If you do go the FW 800 route, you'll need a 9pin to 4pin cable. B&H Photo Video has some in stock.

Not sure this is completely applicable but I recently separated out my Firewire 400 gear and the harddrives I have which can run Firewire 800 by adding a PCI card to my Powermac Dual G5 computer running Final Cut and it has made a tremendous improvement in the computers response. If you are running a Mac there is only one Firewire Bus so by adding the card it gave me more bandwidth on the faster drives. This may help once the footage is in the computer if you keep the camera connected for viewing on a monitor.

Dale,
Adding an FW800 card will not improve performance of capturing video from a camera. That is realtime regardless of it being HDV or DV.

Adding an FW800 will give your computer a second Firewire buss and, as Daniel described on his G5, can produce faster Firewire attached hard disk performance.

Performance is a combination of things including your computer, it's configuration, the design of the FW800 card and the Firewire drive. For example, given the same setup, a Firewire drive with a 7200 rpm disk will generally have faster transfer and seek times than a 5400rpm drive. Most tests I've seen show you really need a 7200rpm disk to get the advantage of FW800. There are generalizations. Drive size and cache affect performance too.

All that said, if your system captures HDV fine on an an FW400 port and you buy a cable to go from 9-pin FW800 to 4-pin, your capture performance will not change. However, if you have 7200RPM external Firewire drives, you will see a performance improvement as far as operations involving the drives.

Good evening,

Thanks for the information!!!

My computer does not have a plain pci slot, just three extra pci-e slots and the only card i could readily find for it was an 800 1394B. actually quite expensive for a fire wire card!! then i have to get the cables too!!