garageCube

[workhouse]

so what the best way to attach 2 cameras plus an external hard drive to a new mac laptop with only the one firewire input ? cant daisychain the camera thru the drive

also , im using,maybe 4 layers at once , do i still really need to use an external?
thanks in advance

[vanakaru]

so what the best way to attach 2 cameras plus an external hard drive to a new mac laptop with only the one firewire input ? cant daisychain the camera thru the drive

No!
Apple allow just one firewire camera. And it is dv compressed video stream, that is not be recommended due to heavy on CPU in any way. If you plan to use a FW hard drive on the same bus you most likely get no video steam at all - you just oversaturate the FW bus.
I recommend using USB cams or capture devices to get multiple video inputs.
Also there is plenty of talk about this here and on VJForums.com

[sigmasix]

not so right

Apple allows as many firewire cameras as the firewire bus can handle, but only one DV stream at a time.

There are plenty of firewire cameras that are not DV !

During the early multi camera tests in modul8, I tried using internal isight, external isight trough firewire800 and DV cam through firewire400 and it worked well! I remember, as I didn't have a firewire 800 to 400 cable for the isight, I plugged my firewire800 lacie disk which has also 400 plug in it to chain 400 drives. It worked great.

Anyway, in a broadcast environment you'd much prefer capture cards for your broadcast cameras