[Langdon]

I want to import video from a Sony video camera but I need to store the project on an external hard drive. Is doing a daisy chain possible, and if so in what order, or will it choke the data width.? And if it is not can I import the video data through the firewire port and send it to the external drive hooked in through USB 2?

I need a viable solution to do this project because there just is not enough room on the iBook's drive.
Also how much space does 1 minute of video amount to in drive space in iMovie.

[Dakkon]

you can use the dv cam on firewire, and the HD on the usb bus. it will be ok, but keep in mind that with that set up your external hard drive will be the choak, i would get an external hard drive, with both firewire, and usb, that way when you get the data on the drive, and don’t need to have the camera plugged in anymore, you can change the plug on the HD and have the HD on the firewire bus when the camera is unplugged.

[tooki]

What a convoluted way to do it. There's no reason to resort to USB.

Yes, you can daisy chain FireWire if your hard drive has two ports on the back. The order is irrelevant. You will not have data bottlenecks -- FireWire is 50MB/sec (=400Mb/sec), while DV is a continuous stream of 3.6MB/sec. To copy to a hard disk, the DV stream must flow twice (once to the computer, once from the computer to HD), but even the cumulative 7.2MB/sec is FAR below FireWire's capacity.

You can also buy a FireWire hub, which gives you a more convenient star configuration, but makes no difference to performance.

tooki