01-09-2010, 01:59 PM

Hello! I have a canon vixia hv30 camcorder and the only way to get movies off of it onto the computer is firewire. Since my macbook does not have a firewire, I was wondering if there is some sort of adaptor for a firewire that would plug into my usb port.

If not, does an iMac have a firewire? My dad bought one last year and I guess if it had one, I could get the movies off the camera with that, then use my macbook for editing.

My last resort is my windows machine... It has a firewire port, so is there a way to move the movies from that to my mac for editing?

Thank you for any help you can give!!!!

Wendy

01-12-2010, 09:58 AM

iMac's have FW connections. For your MacBook, bad news, there's no expansion card slot on them anymore. Don't ask me why the expansion card slot and FW are gone, I've no clue why Apple did that.

01-12-2010, 11:13 AM

I was hoping there was a usb to firewire expansion possibility. :-( This is the only downfall of my macbook!

01-12-2010, 11:52 AM

There actually is such a beast as a usb2.0 to firewire adapter BUT AFAIK, you can't use it directly in OSX (drivers only exist for windows, so you'd still have to at least run Parallels or Fusion in a VM to use it). USB 2.0 and firewire are just really different technologies and they aren't designed for cross-use like that, but if you want to look at the item that supposedly works (at least in windows), it's here:
USB to FireWire DV Adapter - NTSC - US Version

Yeah, it's a bummer that they took FW out of the base macbook line. My guess is they wanted to have something that made an obvious differentiation between the MB and the MBP - I mean look at the 13" MBP, there is not a huge difference between those models, so if someone were looking and needed firewire, that's an easy way to guarantee they would have to buy a MBP.