I am in the market for an HD camcorder, and lately, all the models I am looking at do not have firewire ports. Can Liquid deal with a camcorder that is connected to the PC via a USB port? Or, am I stuck looking for cameras that have firewire? It seems to be narrowing down my choices if this is a requirement.

Most camcorders that just have a USB port are file based, usually AVCHD. Liquid does not support AVCHD. Some cameras, such as some JVC cameras use the .tod format which Liquid does support. In that case, the USB port is used to copy the files onto your hard drive where you then import them into Liquid. I am not aware of any video camera that uses a USB connection to stream the video out (except for webcams). If you are talking about such cameras, then no, Liquid does not support them for capture.

LewS is right on, the way the camera works with the computer is different with USB than Firewire. Usb is used to transfer only not useful for editing though and if you have a BOB or MBD it can cause issues with watching output to a TV when the camera is hooked up to the computer. I have the JVC HD7 and I transfer clips to the computer using USB. You transfer the clips to a hard drive on your computer then pull the clips into Liquid where I can drag the files it creates on the hard drive to the timeline (records HDV in a TOD format). Firewire transfer is limited to 1440x1080 not 1920x1080 and the limit is actually the standard for firewire. I can't say I see a whole lot of difference between the 2 but the numbers are there. Not sure how much this helps but good luck..........Edd

I was afraid you all were going to say that. I don't know why this is happening. There is still plenty of use left in the firewire standard, especially when it comes to capturing live bidirectional I/O. But the cameras really are deleting their firewire offerings. Especially HD cameras are bereft of the firewire, going instead to USB-based output. The Apple community is especially angry, because they invented the standard, and Steve Jobs is even getting rid of it on some MAC models.

Any camera that records to tape is going to have firewire output. The newer cameras use media of some sort digital and or hard drive........Edd

moodman:

I was afraid you all were going to say that. I don't know why this is happening. There is still plenty of use left in the firewire standard, especially when it comes to capturing live bidirectional I/O. But the cameras really are deleting their firewire offerings. Especially HD cameras are bereft of the firewire, going instead to USB-based output. The Apple community is especially angry, because they invented the standard, and Steve Jobs is even getting rid of it on some MAC models.

There is no reason for firewire in a file based camera. You don't need to control the deck because there is no deck. You don't need to capture material from the camera because you can just copy it to the hard drive and import it into your editing app. In the long run, this saves time as there is no need for realtime capture like with tape. This speeds up the workflow significantly. Firewire, as already stated, limits the resolution to HDV (1440x1080). File based cameras are capable of much higher resolutions like 4K and up (see the RED cameras).

Again, the technology is changing rapidly.