Question : How can I record two DV (firewire) inputs simultanously to a PC or Mac?

Hi experts!  I need some advice please.

How would I go about recording two DV (firewire) inputs simultanously to a PC or Mac using standard firewire-capable video cameras.  I hope to achieve a system capable of recording raw DV files (as opposed to MPEG2 or H264) from each firewire input, suitable for later downloading and importing into a NLE such as Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere.  I have software for converting the different flavours of DV (avi and quicktime formats) so that shouldn't be a problem.

I will be using two Sony DSR-PDX10 DVCAMs in case that helps.

I don't mind whether it's a PC or MAC to do the recording.  Whichever way we choose, it will be dedicated to the job.

Cooincidentally, does anyone have any experience using remotely controllable PT (pan-tilt) heads?

Thanks in advance!

Answer : How can I record two DV (firewire) inputs simultanously to a PC or Mac?

I would second the above comment. Remember, FireWire is a very high performance serial bus, the key word here being "BUS", which means that streams share the wire. You will need to be sure that the total bandwidth needed for each stream is significantly less than the total bandwidth of the FireWire bus. I also agree, the bandwidth on the target drive must also be sufficient.

But, it gets better. As I suspect the camera input goes to the processor first, and is then written to the drive, so this means that 2x the bandwidth is needed for each device. The read from the camera, and the write to the drive.

You might be able to get away with two FireWire drives and two FireWire cameras, and target each input to a separate drive.

HOWEVER, I recommend something better: If you have a tower based computer where you can add a card, you can buy FireWire cards you can add to your computer (usually a PC in this case but I did have one for a Mac as well) so that you will have two separate FireWire buses, the one built into the machine, and the one on the card.  Then put one camera and one drive on each bus. This should work, but again, this would also require that the computer has enough processing power to keep up with all the streams.

I have used remote pan/tilt cameras, but only for security applications. They are not very accurate, and suffer from lag time unless you are watching the actual input stream. What are you trying to do?