A collection of newbie's questions

[pahidla]

Hi,

I'm a complete beginner. I have a TRV22 and shoot video (which is probably not of the highest quality) of my family. I'm insterested at capturing and saving the video at sufficiently high quality that I can feel comfortable to overwrite the tape. I'm interested in burning it on DVD with minimal menus, etc. I don't think I will be doing any editing.

I will now ask a bunch of questions that I have accumulated but have been unable to find answers to in forms and faqs. If anyone finds any of these messages interesting, maybe I should start a separate thread.

1. Can a laptop provide sufficient resources for the job that I'm trying to do (I have an IBM T40, 1.6gh, unknown hd speed, possibly 5400)?
2. If I am low on harddrive space, can I use a firewire drive?
3. Is recommended to do "tapeless" capture, i.e. capture directly to hardrive with no tape in the camcorder?
4. If I don't care about compatibility with current DVD players (but do want it to be a relatively generic solution for the future), should I encode into mpeg4 rather than mpeg2?
5. If I am not interested in saving, should I consider capturing directly to an mpeg?
6. I bought a $14 firewire card on eBay. Is there such a thing as a bad firewire card? How do I tell?

Thanks!

Pahida

[flaninacupboard]

Hi,

I'm a complete beginner. I have a TRV22 and shoot video (which is probably not of the highest quality) of my family. I'm insterested at capturing and saving the video at sufficiently high quality that I can feel comfortable to overwrite the tape. I'm interested in burning it on DVD with minimal menus, etc. I don't think I will be doing any editing.

I will now ask a bunch of questions that I have accumulated but have been unable to find answers to in forms and faqs. If anyone finds any of these messages interesting, maybe I should start a separate thread.

1. Can a laptop provide sufficient resources for the job that I'm trying to do (I have an IBM T40, 1.6gh, unknown hd speed, possibly 5400)?

Yes, i was creating DVD's on a 650mhz machine. it's slow, but it works.

2. If I am low on harddrive space, can I use a firewire drive?

Capturing straight to an external drive may cause problems. they make excellent storage devices though.

3. Is recommended to do "tapeless" capture, i.e. capture directly to hardrive with no tape in the camcorder?

I do this all the time without problems.

4. If I don't care about compatibility with current DVD players (but do want it to be a relatively generic solution for the future), should I encode into mpeg4 rather than mpeg2?

this is a personal choice. i wouldn't want to compress the crap out of my family memories then place them on an unreliable writable medium.....

5. If I am not interested in saving, should I consider capturing directly to an mpeg?

I wouldn't, no. your machine isn't really fast enough. if it's only a temporay file is file size really a consideration?

6. I bought a $14 firewire card on eBay. Is there such a thing as a bad firewire card? How do I tell?

No. some external drives don't perform quite as well with certain chipsets, but this shouldn't ever be a problem working with DV.


Final thing i will say, do you REALLY want to wipe those tapes? if you buy packs of ten or more they work out ~$4 a piece or so, is it worth erasing family memories for that cost?