Capturing DV to straight to Laptop - bypassing tape?

[Toogy]

I need to do a shoot that will be about 2 hours long and will not have time to change tapes in my Mini-DV camcorder. I was thining of capturing the DV straight to my Laptop without a tape in the camera.

Do you guys think a Laptop with a Celeron 500 MHZ with 384 MB of Ram running Windows XP (NTFS) will have a problem capturing video to an external firewire hardrive (80 GB)?

Is this too much to ask of this laptop?

[rhegedus]

Difficult to tell - as long as the laptop doesn't have any unnecessary software running and the external HD is up to 2hrs of constant use then it should be OK. Your best bet is to try a few 2hr captures before you need to do it for real.

You will also need to consider battery/power supply for a 2hr capture.

[Will Hay]

Is this too much to ask of this laptop?

Yes, in my opinion.
This is what I'm basing my opinion on, so is this.
Good luck, I hope it works for you
Will Hay

[rhegedus]

Erm..... didn't the Village Idiot have 'large success' using a lower spec laptop?

[Will Hay]

Erm..... didn't the Village Idiot have 'large success' using a lower spec laptop?

Erm?
Erm, you tell me Rob, I'm posting my results from my experience.
Will

[rhegedus]

Just noted that one of the links was a 'success' of sorts.

Wasn't questioning your opinion

[triphop]

The biggest problem with low-end laptops is the disk throughput. It appears that 5400rpm is probably the lowest you ever want to go with DV (25Mbps I think). Most laptop drives are 4200rpm and lower. This is issue.

I would imagine that a better solution is one of the SFF (Small Form Factor) boxes. A bit more bulky - but if you are handy you could build one into a padded camera case of the correct dimensions and also use it as a audio-capture station.

[bugster]

Take a look Here for a possible solution.

[Will Hay]

The biggest problem with low-end laptops is the disk throughput. It appears that 5400rpm is probably the lowest you ever want to go with DV (25Mbps I think). Most laptop drives are 4200rpm and lower.

Strangely enough my captures were fine directly to my laptop HDD via the ADVC-100.
It was when I tried to capture to my 7200rpm firewire HDD I had massive frame loss
Will Hay

[triphop]

I wonder how hard it would be just to capture straight to a firewire HDD... Its something to try tho...

The nice thing about the link that given above is the size and convenience of the package - it mounts on the tripod screw.

[Will Hay]

Just noted that one of the links was a 'success' of sorts.

Wasn't questioning your opinion

Sorry Rob, bad day combined with the fact I always find this "erm?" shit quite rude, my bastard of a boss does it to me by email all the ******* time...

"erm, that £2m projection for March looks unrealistic"

Bastard

[rhegedus]

"erm, that £2m projection for March looks unrealistic"

What, you mean Leed's resale value? I agree with him!

[gab2001uk]

Just a thought. Although you are using a DV camera, if the end product is going on DVD, you could always capture analogue from the camera direct to MPEG2 with a hardware capture card. The spec of the laptop drives is not then important. Terratec do a couple of suitable products

[triphop]

Realtime encoding of MPEG2 on the laptop quoted above - not bloody likely. The only way to do that would be offload the encoding onto an external (or plug-in) device. Be prepared to reach deep into your wallet for that solution.

[gab2001uk]

camera direct to MPEG2 with a hardware capture card.

Note the word Hardware
Take a look at This device, althouhgh if you check specs it does say 800MHz minimum.