Sony HDR-HC3 HDV Capture

[plugh]

I have a Sony HDR-HC3 - records great in HD. I can't get the video to capture to a PC in HD mode no matter what. I use a firewire cable and I've tried WinDV HDVSplit and DVIO - not one of thenm recognized the camera and typically they report no DV Output Pin?? If I put the camera in a mode to convert the HDV to DV on output then they all recognize the camera and capture over the firewire no problem. This really shouldn't be that hard. I just want to try captureing the true HD video for a change. Spent all night looking on the web for solutions and founf nothing that works. TIA

[edDV]

Hmm. Of those three only HDVSplit captures HDV.

I've had issues with some XP machines but all my Vista/Win7 machines capture with HDVSplit.

Vista Home Premium and Ultimate should capture HDV through WMM but I only tried it once. Note that HDV isn't OS supported like DV. You need a capture app.

[plugh]

hmmm - thanks for the info. I'm new to HD capture so please excuse the ignorance. I tried again today with HDVSplit. It does recognize the camera via iLink even with the HDV to DV conversion off so it recognizes the HD stream. When I try to capture though it creates an empty file.m2T file even though it states it's capturing and the preview panel shows nothing. when I end the capture it leaves the file still empty? Subsequent capture attempts end after a couple of seconds with an INFO message - no more data being received from the camera. If I just hit play in HDVSplit the camera starts up but the preview panel shows nothing at all.

[minidv2dvd]

try this with hdvsplit. connect the cam in HDV play mode. wait a minute. start hdvsplit. when it finds the cam, set file name and output directory where you want the capture. uncheck preview(you can watch on the cam screen), check split scenes, synchronize audio and video, and dropped packets. click the capture circle. wait, let it stop with the message about no more data. now click capture again. it should start a capture run.

with some cams the beginning of the tape and hdvsplit just don't work well together.

[plugh]

Thanks a lot for trying to help me out here. Still didn't work though and I followed your instructions exactly. Every time I hit record it starts the tape, about 2 secs in I get the message about no more data. I tried moving to further on in the tape - didn't help. If I turn off splitting and then turn on capture tape starts and tape continues to run but the destination m2t file stays empty (0 bytes). I hit stop and the tape stops so the camera control buttons all do what they are supposed to do - just no capture.

[zoobie]

picture motion browser

[plugh]

So I tried capturing with Windows Movie Maker which did work. Trouble is then the resulting file is dvr-ms and I had to then 'publish' the movie to an HD 1080P wmv file. I'd rather just be able to create a HD video file as MPEG or AVI. But at least this capture worked - no idea why HDVSplit doesn't.

[minidv2dvd]

capture of HDV should result in 1440x1080i mpeg-2 transport stream files. anything else isn't capturing what's on the tape.

[plugh]

Update - I tried another computer (Vistas as well) and HDVSplit worked fine. I re-downloaded HDVSplit from the same location to the original laptop and now it works fine there too?! Claims to be the same version of HDVSplit. In any event captured to a single file, renames the extension to MPEG and WMP plays the file just fine and shows it to be 1440x1080i. thanks all. good to go until the next problem