Resolume Forum

hi
does anyone have experience about having several firewire inputs running at the same time. i am buying Lacie firewire800 pcmcia card
for my laptop in order to connect external harddrive to fw800 port,
and one or two dv cameras to fw400 ports. what kind of (loss of) performance should i expect with two cameras? is there a difference in performance between native fw port and pcmcia cards port? is there other issues that i should be aware of?

fujitsu-siemens amilo a1630
amd athlon 64
3200 ghz
1ghz ram
lacie d2 extreme ext. harddrive

suvanto

[Muokattu 17-1-2006 Lähettäjä: suvanto]

This topic has come and gone several times in the past, do a search for more info, but here's what I'll tell you right now. Firewire is not an ideal connection for cameras in resolume. It slows down the system noticably. I run up to 4 cameras at a show at a time, and have learned to not use firewire for any of them. Internal and external tv capture cards are the way to go, as they have their own processors for working with the video inputs. Firewire utilizes your cpu to deal with the video, which you need to run resolume. It could also potentially crash resolume, or at the very least that input channel until resolume restarts, if a firewire cable were to come unplugged. The loss you would experience from trying to run several at the same time would likely be significant.

I run my cameras through various tv capture cards, experience has taught me this, and now i don't show any noticable performance loss when using cameras, even when 3 are on at the same time. The trick to using tv cards though is that despite how many different cards there are out there, there are really only 3 or 4 chipsets - and you can't use more than one of the same chipset as your computer won't be able to differentiate between the two.

Hope this helps a little bit. If you want to try multiple firewire cameras, good luck, but you've heard my word of warning...

hi
thanks a lot Nexus, seems like i really have to concider my next move.

suvanto