One of the moderators resolved my problem with my new camcorder by saying, before you do anything buy a Firewire cable and try again. I did, and that instantly worked. I reimported a file, processed it with Nero, and burned it. The video quality was better, as well, as promised, but the big deal for me was being able to go from soup to nuts without a hitch. Film, import, edit, burn, play DVD.
I am pretty well squeezed today (this week and next, in addition to two day trips, I dwell in Grantistan, as the annual LSTA grant is due on the 21st), so I can’t unfurl this thought as well as I’d like, but my experience made me think of an interesting post at It’s All Good that talks about the “wisdom of crowds” versus “Blink.”
I wonder how much these theories are in fact congruent, not disparate. In seeking expertise from camcorder enthusiasts, I had to make some spot decisions about the advice I was getting. I know that the authority of the list’s moderators had some influence over me–if their website is perceived as authoritative, people will use it, and that will sell ads, so when they speak up, I listen. But I also found myself evaluating individual responses in terms of my life experience (that guy reminds me of so-and-so, etc.).
Posted on this day, other years:
- Twitterprose Lives Again - 2008
- Teaching, and turning 50 - 2007
- Google Grooves on Libraries - 2005
- Veterans' Educational Benefits - 2005
- My Blogroll - 2005
6 Comments
Ah, yes. The Miss Marple approach.
“It’s just that living in a village as I do, one gets to know so much about human nature.”
I was amazed by Firewire a few years ago too. I had to spend some grant money for a digitization grant and one of our IT guys tried to tell me that USB 2.0 was as fast as Firewire.
I ended up going with the USB 2.0 that already existed on our systems for cost effectiveness, but the tests show that FW is faster. USB 2.0 seems to be the standard on most out of the box hardware though.
http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm
I bought a digital camcorder in December of 2002, which eventually necessitated the addition of a firewire card, Pinnacle Studio software, more RAM, and a second hard drive. I’m glad I made the additional investments; the quality of the video and speed of the transfer via firewire was much better.
Really enjoy your blog.
Yes, USB is standard on PCs, and Firewire is nearly always an add-on. For my laptop it was as simple as adding a card. (Points off for Dell for not only omitting Firewire from my laptop but from the docking station.) But most people will be working with a PC. I could squeeze in a Firewire card pretty easily, but my desktop is a bit of a pig–not worth the investment.
I’m sure it’s all a dance: USB makes the camcorder sale… but you really need Firewire if you’re going to actually make DVDs. I’m curious how people use their camcorders–if a lot of them keep the tapes and hook the camera up to the TV set.
Hi, I’m chiming in quite late (was at a conference and not reading blogs). I second the recommendation about the external hard drive. We have a couple of LaCie external hard drives and store digitized video there, as well as proces the new stuff to them. Cool thing about firewire: it’s easy to daisy chain devices.
We have a couple of external hard drives that are greatly underutilized (we back up to them) so they’d do in a pinch, but these are getting so cheap (I saw a humongous Sony drive for $99) that I may just get a “video drive.”
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