Sony TRV730, Video Footage, Now What?

[psappha]

Hello -

I was on vacation and bought a TRV730 (spare me the "you shouldn't have bought that"'s please! )

Anyways - I'd like to be able to get some of this online to edit and make into something like an avi or mpg format. However, I think I'm missing the middle-ware hardware...would a firewire card such as a dlink work? The camera has a USB port, but doesn't seem to have any functions to do digital video from the tape out.

Maybe I'm just being stupid - but your assistance would be GREATLY appreciated in just some direction.

Thanks!

psappha

[jtor]

The Pinnacle Studio DV should be a good starting point. It's not so expensive, and it does the job well.

My cam doesn't have the USB port, but I'm thinking the purpose of that is just for still image transfers.

hope this helps.

[JHebert]

First you need a Firewire/1394 interface PCI card. As jtor said the Pinnacle is a good choice and there are lots of others available. This gives you a port to connect to the Firewire port on your camcorder.
You also need an application for capturing and editing your video. Usually the Firewire card comes bundled with software which can range from really basic beginner stuff to high end programs like Adobe Premiere or Ulead Media Studio. There are also some freeware and shareware programs available.
Finally if you want to create VCD, SVCD, or DVD to play on a DVD player you need encoding software to convert from AVI to MPEG format. You also need authoring software to layout the disk and burn to CD-R or DVD-R. Sometimes encoding, authoring, and burning functions are built into one program but you can also use seperate programs for each step. Again there are many commercial and freeware or shareware programs available.
Of course you also need a CD or DVD burner. to write the finished project to disk.
Try reading the What Is and How To guides here to get some background info and get you started.

[psappha]

Thanks for the replies. I ended up getting a firewire card yesterday (a maxtor 4300) and played around. What I noticed though is that a huge amount of packets were dropped when encoding, and when I play back the video on my computer is very "jumpy" and the sound is very bad. The software that came with the card is the same one that came with the camera (can't remember the name offhand) and isn't really good. Is there something better that will be able to grab all the packets from my camera to the computer? Or is the card just junk?

[dvd_for_me]

psappha,
are u talking about the avi you captured being jumpy and missing frames, or the mpg you encoded from the avi? If its the avi, you may need some more RAM or a faster computer. But I have never had a problem with dropped avi frames in studio DV even on my old 300 Mhz Celeron with 96 MB RAM.

[psappha]

Yes I mean from the camera to the computer in AVI format. This is what I ended up buying...

http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/proddetail.html?prodkey=AFW-4300&cat=%2fTechn...-1394+Adapters

And it seems to have MGI VideoWave 4. Is this any good or should I get something else?

[JHebert]

If you're dropping a lot of frames when capturing AVI from the camcorder it could be caused by too slow hard drive performance. Check that your hard drive(s) have DMA enabled and defragment them. The DV format is compressed somewhat by the camcorder but its still a lot of data transfer (about 3.6MB/s) so a slow drive will cause problems.
Also make sure you have latest DirectX runtimes on your system as there have been improvements to drivers and other components.
Finally I have heard of an issue with different Firewire/1394 drivers which can effect performance. Their is a Texas Instruments 1394 driver that sometimes get installed with your card but in some cases the Microsoft DV drivers work better instead. But check into the first two things before messing with this.

[drnoe]

Lost frames is your DMA setting for your hard drive. Enable DMA and frame drop usually goes away (depending on your hard drives transfer rate).

[psappha]

Ahh, that's prolly the problem. My harddrive is about a hundred years old. I've been toying with the idea of getting a new one, so this is a good enough reason to.

So that software isn't bad to use? Or should I just get something better while out shopping (actually I'd prolly look for it online first).

Thanks again.

[EricB]

PSAPPHA:

I'm not sure about your opening comment ("spare me...&quot. The TRV-730 is a great camera.

Once you get your hard drive straightened out, I suggest you try Scenalyzer for DV video capture. There is a free trial download and it really does a great job.