XH-A1S Canon Camcorder

[Camo Dave]

Hi,
I need some help I bought a 2nd hand XH-A1S Professional camcorder, I’ve since found out there are no firewire connections or anywhere to slot a card reader into my laptop, is there anyway I can download the taped footage onto my laptop. Ed Merritt can you help?

[rs170a]

I looked online and found this so look in your manual for the location of the 6 pin firewire terminal. If you don’t have the cable buy one either online or in a store.

A robust 6-pin IEEE 1394 terminal is provided on the XH A1S to provide enhanced durability when using external devices.

Mike

[JackWolcott]

Hard to tell from your question whether the problem is with your inability to find the firewire port on the camera, which Mike has addressed, or that your laptop doesn’t have a firewire port. If the latter is the case you can purchase a firewire-to-USB cable — about $25 from Amazon and elsewhere. This should work, assuming of course that your laptop has USB ports, which most do.

[rs170a]

Deleted double post

[rs170a]

Jack, every video forum I’ve ever been on does not recommend a firewire to USB cable.
A guy I trust implicitly on the Creative Cow Vegas forum had this to say about that type of cable:

“A USB to Firewire cable cannot transfer any data. It is designed to charge firewire devices from a USB port. It is not a USB to Firewire converter (such a device does not exist), all it carries is electrical current.”

Mike

[dnuttall]

At the risk of this topic being “stale”, I’ve owned/used an XHA1s for about 8 years and started with Cineform “capture” and codec technology which is not embedded in Adobe CS “Premiere Pro” until just before Cineform was swallowed up by GoPro.

You might be able to capture with a Mac and FW->USB, but even with a Mac, you’d likely be money/time/frustration ahead by interfacing to the “Thunderbolt” port with a small FW->Apple plug from BestBuy, et al. In fact, I use such a converter to record audio on the Mac with ProTools 12.x from a Digidesign 003+ rack (outdated Avid hardware).

This very day I’m considering REPLACEMENT of the XHA1s because the longer I use it the less reliable the playback is and tape is getting harder and harder to find.

PM me to commiserate. I have several videos on-line/public with XHA1s of pianist with 4 mics feeding the XHA1s via the Digidesign 003+. They’re not broadcast quality, but adequately serve for amateur musicians!

Dave
San Antonio, TX

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