Really stupid Firewire question

[timmus]

I just got a laptop (Dell M50, P4M 1.8 GHz, state-of-the-art in 2003) which has a Firewire jack. My wife pointed out that I can connect it to our Firewire-equipped Sony camcorder and capture A/V through it.. indeed this has never been a problem on her high-end Macs.

My question is is this true? Can I simply connect the laptop to the camcorder with a regular Firewire cable?

And if it is true, what sort of programs should I be looking at to do the capture? Will most of the ones listed under "capture tools" recognize the Firewire video source (and perhaps drive the camcorder)?

[thecoalman]

You can use anything to capture from firewire, even windows movie maker.

[gll99]

Yes she is right. I have a Sony mini dv and can do just that. It's generally called the pass thru feature.
Just hook up an av source to the camera and the dv out to your pc firewire and let the camera convert to dv on the fly as it transfers the signal from the source to the pc. I use windv to transfer the video realtime. It needs about 23gig of hdd space per hour as I recall. There are programs that say you can go straight to mpeg or avi but they use file buffering and you almost need as much hdd space for the temp files. I would just go with dv and convert after.

Check the DV forum here there is lot's of info on it.

[daamon]

I'll second WinDV ...and "refine" gll99's estimate - DV AVI is as close as matters to 13.5Gb per hour of footage.

[gll99]

@daamon
Yes of course 13.5. Thanks for correcting that

Off the cuff I was thinking of my last transfer which I know is under 2 hours. I've done a few vhs movies and some of my av home videos from my old camera and it's a lot better than with my tuner card.

[timmus]

Thanks much! I went out and bought a Firewire cable and used windv and it worked without a hitch! For weeks I'd been wanting a video card and didn't realize I had all the gear right under my nose... Christmas came 3 weeks early.

Now if I can find a cheap alternative to Premiere I'll be in business.

[redwudz]

What I use for DV to DVD is: WinDV for transfer, VirtualDub Mod for edits and filtering. Frameserve the video to TMPGEnc encoder. Save out the audio to WAV with VDMod, encode to AC3 with ffmpeggui. Author with TMPGEnc DVD Author, combining the AC3, and burn. Not fancy, but it works for me.

If you just want a quick conversion, DivxToDVD works well. There is a freeware version still available. Not the quality of the above method, but it's easy.

[daamon]

Now if I can find a cheap alternative to Premiere I'll be in business.

www.videohelp.com/tools?listuser=&orderby=Type&s=17#17

Of the ones listed in the above link, these stand out for me as being NLE's like Premiere, but with reduced functionality (I use Premiere Pro 1.5, and Premiere 6.0 before that):

Avid Free DV
Zwei-stein
AviTricks
Video Edit Magic
Vegas Movie Studio
Pinnacle Studio
Ulead Videostudio
Adobe Premiere Elements

Good luck!