Firewire question

define "anywhere near it"? the fire wire cables can be 12 feet in spec, and may work even longer, or hubs/repeaters may extend them.

www.focusrite.com/answerbase/en/article.php?id=206

As for the laptop unless the deck can write directly to a harddrive you need a firewire port on the laptop. there are laptop expansion cards that do this if you have the slot.

www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1683315615...

I dont have room for it anywhere in. The same room. My main question is....if I install sony vegas on my tower and laptop. Can I connect the hard drive to the dvcam via firewire and to the laptop via usb just to utilize the capture in vegas. And then just move the hard drive.

you cannot bridge through the harddrive. you can only connect one input at a time.

If your deck can somehow write to the harddrive on its own you can do that and move the drive. My experience with FireWire video cameras was you needed a capture program on a PC to get the output. So you would have to add a FireWire port to the laptop, connect the deck to the laptop and use the laptop to capture video and store it on the drive

Unfortunately Firewire and USB are neither Pin nor Bus compatible, I am not aware of any external devices which can convert a Firewire interface into a USB interface and I imagine that due to interface restrictions they probably do not exist