I need a little advice. I recently bought a laptop, a acer 5740. To be honest it was an impulse buy but the last laptop i bought was 4 years ago and i thought laptops had moved on by them. I have a sony mini dv camcorder with loads of mini dv,s which i want to edit on my laptop. However the laptop does not have a firewire port. It has 4 usb ports,hdmi port and a 5 in 1 card reader i.e. it reads sd cards etc. How can i get the tapes onto the laptop? Usb? Firewire would be ideal but my laptop does not have a firewire port. Is there some kind of sd card that can fit a firewire cable onto and then fits into the sd slot,

any advice would be much appreciated,

thanks in advance,

scott

You will need and can get a firewire card for your laptop to capture from the Mini DV.

Something like this. Providing you have a PCMCIA slot on the lap top.

Do a search on Google for "firewire card for laptop" to shop for the best price.

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Every thing said by me should be taken with a pinch of salt. Unless you have high blood pressure, then I would recommend a salt substitute.

But will the laptop be up to editing? From what I understand there is a a lot more to consider!

But will the laptop be up to editing?...

The gadget Midnight Blue has suggested is spot on. And yes, most likely your Acer will be up to it... I run Vegas on my laptop, I edit alot on the move and it's not until I start loading up alot of tracks/effects or previewing in top quality that it starts to get 'laggy'.

Having said that - the laptop is soley there for that purpose - other than the OS there's almost nothing else on it.

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Crane operators use powered heads....

Get a crane on your shoot...

thanks for all your advice. i'm sure i don't have a pcmcia slot which means i can't get the dv tapes onto the laptop.

It looks like it's time to make friends with someone who has a firewire socket on there PC. AND then copy the .avi files on to a data DVDs

Sorry Buddy.

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Every thing said by me should be taken with a pinch of salt. Unless you have high blood pressure, then I would recommend a salt substitute.

The major problem here is that the firewire connection is used to control the camera (play, stop etc), so without the firewire connection, you can't access the functions on your camera. This is an issue as otherwise you would have been able to use a USB to DV cable (they exist).

An option for you is to record via the analogue connections on your camera and convert this to digital. You can do this via an analogue to digital convertor, which can have USB 2.0 connections. No a great solution, but an option available to you.

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