Just rented an HVX200 as a b-cam for weekend shoot. I'd like to capture 1080i/DVCPRO HD if possible, and not on the P2 cards (long form). I have a demo of Edius 4, and a firewire drive via pci card for capture. Anything above DV and I get an error that the external firewire drive is too slow. DVCPRO HD is only 1/4 the bandwidth of firewire. Correct? Maybe somethings wrong with the drive, or a bottleneck with the firewire port.

I could try cineform via PPro on the laptop. Unless a mac is the only way to go. I'll have to test more on this tommorrow. I could live with DV for this job, as it's the final output. My main cam is shooting in 1080i so I'd like to cut this in without have to down convert.

DVCPRO HD is an HD format. 100MB/s. It requires a firewire 800 drive, or secondary internal SATA drive. Firewire 400 cannot handle it. 720p24...yes, FW400 can cut that. 1080i, 1080p...no way.

Thanks for clearing that up. I'll give that a shot, I can convert the 1080i from the other cam to 720p for edits and I'm still better off than DV25.

Hmmm. I just tried the same test on my desktop and captured a long 1080i file to a single FW400 drive. I was able to import the resultant file into a cineform 1080i project with zero issues. So it seems to be working, and my original guess is correct.

My laptop may have something to do with it. I was using a PCMIA firewire card, and I had both camera and drive connected to it. I may have to hook the camera to the laptops dedicated FW400 port and see if that clears things up. Otherwise, I'm dragging this desktop along with, and since it has a raid, I won't bother with the FW drive.