Firewire vs Firewire Basic?

I use FCP 4.5 and am looking for a new miniDV camcorder.
Canons and others are only compatible with "Firewire Basic," while Sonys are full "Firewire."
What does this mean and is it important for things such as black and coding tapes using FCP, recording from FCP to the camcorder, batch capturing and . . .?
Thanks
G4 800   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   FCP 4.5 (HD)

Firewire basic is a subset (reduced instruction set) of firewire. You should not notice any practical difference in operation. More to the point, you need to make sure your camera will play nice with any other devices on your firewire chain. This is where Canon devices seem to have their greatest problem.
The way around this problem (if you have external firewire drives) is to install a firewire card to add a second firewire bus to your machine - PCI for a Powermac and PCMCIA for the Powerbook. All firewire ports on a Mac are on the same bus - FW400 & 800. iMacs etc are not recommended simply because adding a second firewire bus is not possible.
re: blacking tapes. I run the first minute or so of tape with bars and tone before use so I have a time running from the very beginning. Once ready to shoot, I have adequate handle for capturing.
There was a very compelling article around discussing the problems of using blacked tapes in a DV camera. The short version is it is no guarantee the timecode will be continuous and you run the tape twice through the heads for no good reason.
Cheers,
x
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  • WEIRD FIREWIRE/DV MYSTERY

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    I'm looking into purchase of a camcorder and thought Cannon was the Mac cam of choice?<<</div>
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