External Firewire needed for laptop
 

I have a buddy who has a Canon XH-A1 HDV and no firewire in his lappy. I did not ask him WHY!
Is there a suitable quality way to get firewire into a laptop via a USB port?

Not a problem that I have had to solve so these are only possibilities, not verified by me for us with an XH-A1

If the laptop has a PCMCIA slots this might work:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...6396-_-Product
There are several brands available at comparable price points. However, like IEEE1394 (aka: Firewire) ports, PCMCIA has all but disappeared from recent model laptops.

If it has "Thunderbolt" this might work
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008RXYOKY...iglink20269-20

If only USB ports:
Simple gender-bender adapter plugs will not work for video capture. I am not aware of any FIREWIRE-to-USB adapters that will work for ingesting DV/HDV video streams from a camcorder via Firewire.

Other options include finding an old laptop to use for ingesting the video via Firewire, or perhaps using a desktop with a Firewire port/card and copy the resulting files to a USB memory stick/drive. Note that a firewire transfer file should be an exact copy of what was read off the tape (no quality loss).

My past look into such things found there was no such capture/copy device, but this is the place to go for up to date definitive answers.

A bit of further looking, there is one USB2 device that may provide HDV ingestion capability. However it is a bit of a long shot and dates back to around 2004 or so.

Pinnacle's (later owned by Avid) Liquid Edition Pro v6 included a break out box that provided both analog (YUV, RBG, Y/C, and composite) and IEEE 1394 ports. It likely requires a special driver and that Liquid Edition Pro software to be installed on the system. LE Pro v6 did support HDV.

I'm gonna inform him to get an old lappy and HDVSplit. Path of least resistance.

Just watch that the Laptop and its drive have sufficient speed/power to deal with the data rate without dropping frames.

A little research before would have been helpful, though I still have an HV-30, under the correct settings and usage it still has an amazing film-like quality, but I wouldn't run out and buy one today.