Vista and Video Capturing Problem...

[solartaco]

Howdy, long time reader with first time question. I have a problem and I hope you folks might shed some light on a possible fix. I am running Vista Ultimate. I have a PCI firewire card installed, good drivers and all that. I have Vegas Video 8. I hooked my JVC GR-D93 cam to the firewire card. Started Vegas capture. Vegas took cintrol of the Cam and started "capturing". The prview window in Vegas was still black and no video was actually being captured. Restarted everything and still had same issue. Decided to try Windows Movie Maker and got the same issue, but it had an error this time, sorry don't have error message here... Suggestions?

[SCDVD]

sounds like you are missing the Codec that you need for the video that you are trying to capture.

[edDV]

Vista Premium and Ultimate's Windows Movie Maker should have internal support for both DV and HDV formats. Vista Home Basic Movie Maker should have DV format support. Microsoft tech support should have full responsibility. You could also try Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker support forum.

The problem seems to be at the DirectShow level or a compatibility issue with that particular IEEE-1394 card.

[redwudz]

Try WinDV, but I think you have other problems. Does the camera show up in 'My Computer'? Have you checked your 'Device Manager' to see if there are any yellow marks for your 1394A adapter? Does the computer acknowledge with a 'ding' when the camera is connected?

You only need a codec if you want to work with the video. Vista has a DV codec for playback or for transferring. As you are probably aware, DV from a camera to your hard drive is a data transfer, not really a capture as no changes are made to the file. The camera should show up as just another external device, similar to a external drive.

Lastly, try the camera on another computer that has a working FireWire connection. You may have a bad cable, or any type of other problems, such as the transfer setting in the camera. If you rule out the camera and the cable as the problems, then that leaves the FireWire card or something in the computer. Vista has FireWire card drivers that are part of the OS, same as XP.

[JohnnyMalaria]

It is very possible that some other software on your system has hijacked the device driver used for DV. Common culprits include some from Nero and Roxio.

Windows communicates with DV devices using two different drivers. One is for control (play, stop etc) and can be used by multiple programs at the same time. i.e., you can have Vegas and WMM controlling the same camcorder.

For the transfer of the DV data that has the audio and video, only one program can access a given camcorder at the same time.

It's highly unlikely to have anything to do with the codec. A codec isn't required for transfer. If you do end up with an AVI file and it is also just black when played in Windows Media Player, it means the video IS black (i.e., missing at the time of capture). A codec problem would cause an error message to be displayed.

The alternative possibility to the "it can control but not transfer" is along the lines of edDV's comments. I have an old miniDV camcorder that works just fine on one of my computers but, on another, it doesn't. It gets recognized by the system and our software lists it as an attached device, but it can't access it (techically, our software can't get a handle to the DirectShow filter.) When this happens, we display a warning message (plus record a bunch of detail in Windows' event log). WMM is probably doing the same thing. In my example case, there is an incompatibility with the particular combination of camcorder and FireWire interface.

[solartaco]

Wow! You guys are really great. I have the latest codecs installed, and I do have NERO installed also. I did take the Camera and cable to another location and computer and was able to capture ok. I will perhaps try another PCI Firewire card and see what happens. I really am trying to love Vista...Thanks all around!