Hello,

I am looking at buying a laptop and was considering using onlocation or something similiar so taht I could save money on P2 cards and record direct to harddrive during interviews . I was wondering, do I have to get a laptop with firewire, or does onlocation work with USB as well?

Thanks,
Dale W

Dale - I use CS4 OnLocation with a JVC HD100 and as far as I'm concerned it only works via Firewire (and I love it). I don't know of anyone who has successfully captured video over USB using OL. I do know that CS4 Premerie Pro does not natively support capture of video over USB or USB 2.0. So, my guess is that OL also does not have this support.

I actually looked into finding a Firewire to USB adapter of sorts since I thought that would be great to use with a netbook. I could find no netbook with Firewire or PCMCIA style card slot. I've since abandoned this idea since the data rate differences would probably only result in frustration and dropped frames.

Thanks alot for the info Matt. I am definitly looking for something with firewire than - which I see are harder and harder to come by now. Can I ask what laptop you are using or what you would recommend? Also - is harddrive space a big issue? I had a teacher tell me not to get anything less than 7200 rpms?

OnLocation requires firewire.

There is no video protocol for streaming through USB, so don't expect that to ever work.

With an HVX, in HD modes, you'll need about 52 gigabytes per hour of footage.

If you can't find a laptop you like with a firewire port, consider one with an ExpressCard or PCMCIA slot; you can add firewire through one of those ports.

Hard drive space could definitely be an issue. Here is what I currently use to capture HD from my JVC HD100 using CS4 OL:
Dell D630 (running Vista :( )
PCMCIA Firewire card
External USB 2.0 7200 RPM 500GB hard drive - I'd highly recommend a fast drive.

I found out that if I was able to keep from capturing data onto the same hard drive as my OS lives on things seemed to flow much better. From what I can remember this is actually recommended by Adobe somewhere. I normally dump all data off the external hard drive onto another 2 as soon as I can (for redundancy). I then format my external drive before starting with a new project.