On  Fri Oct 22 Guenter Waibel asked:

I have two very specific question concerning a digital camera connected via
firewire to a mac capturing video.
(1) Is it possible for the camera to save the video directly onto the
harddisc, instead of going through the intermediate step of saving to the
camera's memory?
(2) Does imovie support the type of video capture I have described above?
We are trying to set up an interactive kiosk at the Berkeley Art Museum at
which visitors can record their responses to our shows. They would record
their little clips onto the Harddisk, and we would pull them via our
Internal Network, edit them, compress them, and then post them to the
kiosk/web as quicktime videos.


In answer to your questions:
1) Yes it is possible to send video directly to the computer's hard drive
via firewire, regardless of whether the camcorder is recording or not. If
the camcorder is sending video out along the firewire the computer can
record and save it. Most camcorders continuously send video out as long as
they are powered on.
2) imovie probably will not suit your needs as it is not intended to
operate continously. There is a program available on the internet called
'Videoscript' at http://www.videoscript.com/. There is a free 'lite'
version which may be all you need.  It is possible to write a script in
Videoscript that would automatically record the incoming firewire video for
a set period of time and save it directly to the hard drive.

You could also look at Smart Video at
http://www.iknowsystems.com/SmartVideoPage/SmartVideo.html which I do not
know as well but would probably also do exactly what you need.

If you have any other questions or specific questions about setting them up
I'd be glad to offer any advice I can.

Pamela Ramsay-Cohen

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