firewire card

beattiesman

have a toshibe equium A210-1C4 laptop how do i tell if it has a firewire card installed. also if i connect my camcorder to laptop how can i tell if its recognised it thanks

spakkker

It will have a 4 pin firewire connect , I-link ???
Surely windows will notify you by icon in tray or balloon message. You may have to load cam software , better to do this before connecting cam unless info says otherwise.

spannerzone

4 pin firewire socket looks like this
(shown next to the 6 pin larger firewire plug that goes into the camcorder)

Once connected, assuming you have firewire (many laptops don't) you then have to capture the footage onto the PC. Basically playing the tape back at normal speed and the PC captures this footage, so it takes 60 mins to capture 60 mins of tape footage. It's not 'drag n drop' like a digital stills camera or SD/hard disc video camcorder is.

Then once you've captured the raw footage then you can edit using a video editing program.

Note that DV footage takes up a fair amount of hard drive space.