The Apple FireWire Kit lets you use your FireWire-based digital video (DV) camcorder to produce professional-quality digital video more easily and less expensively than ever before. It also provides an excellent way to get in on the ground floor of the latest trend in digital interfaces: FireWire, an advanced cabling, connection, and communications standard originally conceived by Apple engineers and specifically developed to meet the needs of the rapidly converging worlds of personal computing and consumer electronics.
The Apple FireWire Kit consists of a three-port FireWire PCI card, a 2-meter FireWire cable, and Adobe Premiere plug-ins that support capture, edit, and play back, as well as to export to tape. With the addition of a DV camcorder or deck with a FireWire port and a QuickTime-based video-editing application, the Apple FireWire Kit gives you a great way to get outstandingly crisp, clear digital video footage into your Macintosh.
Working with digital video avoids the degradation in quality inherent to earlier, analog-based video cards, which required you to convert video data between digital and analog formats. And the high-speed, high-capacity nature of FireWire, not to mention its flexibility and scalability is already prompting more and more hardware developers to adopt this standard--which means that you may soon be able to choose from a wealth of advanced digital devices, from cameras to scanners to printers.
Technical specifications:
- Supports 200-Mbps bandwidth
- Supports asynchronous data transfer, as well as isochronous data transfer, which provides guaranteed bandwidth for your video and audio data streams
- Supports flexible configuration options, including daisy-chaining and branching for peer-to-peer implementations (FireWire does not allow closed-loop connections)
- Allows for the addition or removal of devices while the connection is active
The user must supply:
- A FireWire-based DV camcorder or deck
- A QuickTime 3-based video-editing application that supports video import and export
This option includes:
- FireWire PCI card with three ports
- 2-meter FireWire cable (6-pin to 4-pin)
- FireWire system software extensions
- Two plug-ins for Adobe Premiere 4.2
--DV Device Control allows you to control your camera remotely
--DV Export enables you to record your edited footage onto tape
- QuickTime 3 Pro software
The Apple FireWire Kit works with any Power Macintosh G3 desktop or minitower computer running Mac OS 8.1 system software.
For additional information on FireWire, see the following knowledgebase article:
Article 24502: "
FireWire Card: Read Me"