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  1. I am using a trial of sony vegas movie studio + DVD premium. I have 2 questions.

    1. Does the retail version let me capture using that program? I haven't been able to get it to find my camera.(windows finds it just fine). If I cannot, what program should I use to capture with?(Currently using windows movie maker)

    2. What format should I capture to so I can edit it using sony vegas movie studio + DVD premium? I am currently capturing to uncompressed avi to an empty 80 GB hard drive. But since I have over 25 hours of tape, I don't think this is the best format to do it.

    Ok, lied, 3rd questions.

    3. I have no preference in what program I use to edit, (use to use windows movie maker) but I have been recommended sony vegas movie studio + DVD premium. I have also heard that without buying the 500 dollar program (im only getting the 130 dollar one) that I wont be able to make ac3 audio. Is this going to be a big problem? I am only making home videos and some video to be shown at our home show, nothing too spectactular.

    If it matters the camera is a Panasonic DVC30P with an XLR microphone. I recorded in squeeze mode so that when played back it would show widescreen. (I would like to make the video widescreen when editing, when played back on a computer, it shows up full screen, but the people are really skinny. My girlfriend says I need to lose weight, but I don't think thats what she had in mind)
    Hunting, sure i'll go hunting. When is cow season?
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  2. Mod Neophyte redwudz's Avatar
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    If you are using DV through a Firewire card, then try WinDV for the transfers. There is no capturing involved, just data transfers. DV takes about 13GB per hour of hard drive space.

    If it's DV, use that format to edit in. It's 'made' for editing. And if it is DV, you can't change that anyway without re-encoding it.
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  3. So will I need to get a much bigger hard drive to edit all this footage (25 hours) I want to make a 5 minute video that loops that we can play at our home show.

    Is it possible to take the first couple hours, cut them down to what I want to keep, delete the stuff I dont want, then transfer the next couple tapes and do the same? That way I wont need to get a much larger hard drive

    Also, it is a DV camera so all I am doing is transfering. But, if all im doing is transfering, how come it transfers in real time? To transfer one hour of footage it takes one hour. It plays on the camera while transfering. Am I doing this incorrectly?
    Hunting, sure i'll go hunting. When is cow season?
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  4. Mod Neophyte redwudz's Avatar
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    No, you are doing the transfer correctly. It will only transfer in real time from a DV camera. You would need about 300GB to get it all into the computer.

    For what you have presently in hard drive space, yes, it might be easiest to transfer the 'best' parts of each tape, then you can do some finer editing when you have enough video for your purposes. Or you can transfer the whole tape and cut out the parts you don't want. Most any video editor will work with DV for just cutting. I use the freeware VirtualDub Mod most of the time.

    The other alternative is to encode the tapes to a more compact format, but that will make editing harder. (And it will take a fair amount of time. ) And this may also reduce the quality. I would recommend MPEG-2 if your final destination is DVD.

    But, if you are planning to work with DV a fair amount, you might want to look into a 300GB hard drive. Even a external SATA, Firewire or USB 2.0 drive would work fine.
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  5. Always Watching guns1inger's Avatar
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    You have 25 hours of tape, and a 5 minute slot to fill. I would review the tapes, fast forwarding as necessary, and mark out the likely usable parts. Write down the tape, the timecode at that point, the duration, and a brief description of the scene to remind you. This becames the basis for a rudimenatry edit decision list. Now all you have to do is transfer justthe parts you need, trim them down and put them together. Saves a lot of time transfering material you don't need, using up space you don't have, and wastig a lot of time.
    Read my blog here.
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  6. Mod Neophyte redwudz's Avatar
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    Good advice. I should mention that one of the reasons DV is so nice to edit is that each and every frame is a 'keyframe'. That means you can easily edit down to a individual frame. This makes cuts very accurate. Most other AVI formats cannot do this. Divx, for example has keyframes an average of every 300 frames. That only gives a few seconds accuracy at best. And if you want to preserve the quality of your DV, keep it in the DV format until you need to do your final encode. I would save the DV tapes myself. Better methods, like BluRay, may be just around the corner, and you may be able to transfer the DV in whole to a disc for future uses.

    But working with DV at present uses a lot of hard drive space. The best solution is to add more.
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  7. Ok, I appreciate both of the suggestions and plan on doing both.

    I have been transfering some of the tapes over (only on tape 5) and last night I dropped a frame. It was only one, I will be ok right?

    Second, I plan on picking up another hard drive (a replacement actually, just for video work) Currently I use a 80GB with 8mb buffer. What size should I get and does the buffer matter?

    Also, can anyone recommend a good external? I would prefer internal, but the portability is a real feature.

    Almost forgot, I am using the windv program, and I am transfering in an Type 2 AVI which is (vids + auds) what is Type 1 AVI (iavs) and should I use that instead
    Hunting, sure i'll go hunting. When is cow season?
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  8. Mod Neophyte redwudz's Avatar
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    One frame dropped won't hurt anything, though there shouldn't be any dropped.

    For hard drives, a larger buffer helps a little, but a 8MB buffer should be fine. I would look for ~300GB drive, Seagate is popular. If you have SATA on the computer and a spare SATA channel, you could use that. You can also get external SATA drives that work the same speed as the internals when you plug it into the internal SATA socket.

    If not, either an internal PATA (IDE) drive or one of the externals. I prefer Firewire to USB 2.0, but you would need a Firewire card. The most inexpensive setup is to just get a bare drive and a external enclosure and 'roll your own'.

    One place to look for drives is Newegg: http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/Category.asp?Category=15
    On the same page, you will see a selection near the top for external drives. There are plenty of other sources for external hard drives and enclosures.

    Here's a discussion of Type 1 and Type 2 DV: https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=301967
    I prefer Type 2 as it works with VirtualDub Mod and TMPGEnc encoder, which I use a lot for DV.
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  9. Ok, got a 300GB Seagate with 16MB buffer, works great, transfering movies as we speak...err type.

    I have also been playing around with vegas movie studio. I would like to speed the movie up in some parts. (I have scenes where the house is being built, and I would like to show the entire framing process in a couple minutes, sped up really fast I think it would look great) My problem is that I have only been able to speed the video clip up to about 1/4 of the actual time (so i guess 4x) is there a way to make it go faster? I have 12 hours worth of framing, but that would still be too long even sped up. I suppose that I could speed it up, finish the movie like that, then speed the new movie up again but that seems like a lot more work than needed
    Hunting, sure i'll go hunting. When is cow season?
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  10. Mod Neophyte redwudz's Avatar
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    You can try this in VirtualDub Mod: Under 'Video>Framerate>Frame rate conversion>Decimate by' and pick a number, maybe 20 or higher. Save the video. Put it back into VDM and under 'Video>Framerate>Change to' put back in your original framerate (29.970?) Save it again. You can also add some music or other audio as the original audio would be unusable.

    There are probably better ways to do this, but I tried this as a quick experiment and it seemed to get the desired effect. You may be able to do this in Vegas also.
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  11. I bought 2 300 gb seagates with 16mb cache for the tapes. I sped the video up to 4x and it looks pretty cool. anything faster kinda looks dumb. Vegas movie studio premium is an excelent program. Much better than movie maker.

    Thank you redwudz and guns1inger. You both have been a tremendous help
    Hunting, sure i'll go hunting. When is cow season?
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    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there is no current title Sony sells as Movie Maker of sort. And I do agree that Sony's (actually re-branded Sonic's as Sony bought them) Vegas Movie Studio + DVD Platinum Edition is an exellent program. They do have an update for it and DVD Architect on their web site, dunno if you can update your trial version thou but the update will most likely have your camcorder listed. Newegg sells it now for US$89.99.
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  13. You are not wrong. I was referring to windows movie maker. I went out and bought vegas movie studio + dvd architect premium. $130 and is really an excellent program. I was using the most recent trial that they had, but haven't tried transfering with the full version yet. I really like windv. I have been using it to transfer the video and it is also a great program. Watch out george lucas.
    Hunting, sure i'll go hunting. When is cow season?
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