[Joelwins]

Has anyone attempted this?

I'd have to add a CardBus Firewire card, obviously.

I'll also need a lot more storage space - would an external Firewire drive running off the same Cardbus card be sufficient, or am I going to need an internal drive upgrade?

I'd be very interested in anyone's experiences...

It works great.

[icruise]

I did some editing on my Lombard before upgrading to a Pismo. I don't have any problems, although I never used an external firewire disc -- just my internal 20GB. It's cheap now to get an internal 20GB drive for the Lombard, so the first thing I would do would be to get that and see if you need more space.

[Joelwins]

I'm leaning towards an external drive for a couple of reasons:

1) Price
2) Transferability

I don't think that 20gig is going to be sufficient and above 20 gigs external drives seem to be much cheaper. An external drive also means that I'm not limited to the one machine.

I'm pleased that the Lombard's up to it, though.

So, has anyone successfully captured and saved video to an external drive through the same cardbus card?

[mugwump]

Are you kidding? I do all my professional editing with a Lombard 400, Final Cut Pro 2, External FireWire drive, all using the RATOC CBFW2 CardBus pc card. I capture into the Firewire drive all the time with the card with no problem. No problems whatsoever, except a g4 Powerbook would help the render times a bit. A dual powerbook would help even more

--Don't forget about Low Rez capture with Quicktime 5. Since we're all Lombard users here, and the RAM speed is a bit slower than the later Powerbooks, here's a great solution. Previous to Quicktime 5 you could not compress DV footage at all. But in Final Cut Pro 2 with Quicktime 5, just set the capture codec to "Photo JPEG" and the size of the image to "Multimedia Large". Set the quality to mid to low, and BOOM, you have added 10 times the storage to your hard drives. Instead of 4.3 min. per gig, you now get 40 min. per gig! The image is lower resoution, and you can't watch it out the Firewire (use the S-Video out), but the Lombard editing speed is MUCH faster in every way. When you have the finished version ready to go, just bring in the DV footage at regular DV qualtiy.

Again, the RATOC card is the only way to go for Firewire capture. I originally used a Newer Firewire2Go card, but tossed that one away soon enough.

[siegzdad]

I agree that the external drive is a much better way to go. Those firewire enclosures work great -- just pop in your favorite 3.5" EIDE drive, and away you go. Laptop drives are slower, and in a lot of case noisier, and in almost all cases, more expensive.