I needed to record a seminar that I knew was going to be in 3 hour segments were I wasn't going to be able to change tapes. Especially with my bottom loading TRV38, this would have been a real pain in the ass.

So I hooked up my old Celeron 500 laptop running Windows XP and a couple of external firewire drives and the setup worked flawlessly.

Here are a few pics of the setup

http://members.rogers.com/toogood.350/IMG_4103.jpg

http://members.rogers.com/toogood.350/IMG_4125.jpg

That's a good solution if you don't need to move (much) indeed.
I did a similar thing on some setups (http://www.ladyxfilms.com/theater/e14/ps09.jpg) on my Lady X shoot.

So can any laptop with Firewire and an NLE capture live footage?

As long as your camera is outputting the video over firewire, yes.

Thanks Rob, but is there a certain Laptop Hard Drive RPM minimum for doing such a thing? Would the Laptop HD have to be at least 7200 rpm?

I've succesfully done it on a 5400 RPM drive. It depends on how
fragmented that drive is. I can imagine it might work @ 5400 RPM
at one drive and not another. Depends on a lot of things. The
faster the rotational speed, the better. It also needs to have at
least 4 MB/s sustained transfer rate and run in DMA mode.

The best way is just simply to test if you have a laptop available.
I would use a seperate partition with NOTHING else on it to write
the files to. Or you can always hook up an external drive if you
have the power available.

I wonder if the JVC HD10U can do this? Anyone tried this yet?

Murph

Hello All,

I just shot a 5hr dance recital using two cameras. One recorded to my Inspiron 8000 notebook with a Lacie 200GB 1394 drive attached. The other camera recorded to a small desktop system also with a Lacie 200GB drive attached. Both systems recorded flawlessly. Since I used Edition as the capture program on both systems, all I had to do was attach the two Lacie drives to my main edit system and start editing immediately.
I am becoming a big fan of DV and hopefully HDV.