DV to Laptop

[red_octoberz]

Hi,
I have some basic questions
First some background:
I just bought a Sony DV Camcorder TRV17. I also bought a firewire
card (PCMCIA for my laptop) along with the cable.
Now I am trying to capture the video from my DV to my laptop.
I have two software that can capture the video : (a) Adobe Premiere
6.0 and (b) MGI Videowave III

Here are my series of questions
(1) Which of the above software is better and why?
(2) When I capture the video and record it to my laptop, it makes an
AVI file. That file is HUGE. Should I capture as an MPEG instead??
How bad will the quality go? Should it be MPEG 1 or 2?? What is the
difference? Can I capture as an AVI but somehow only get smaller
file?? If I should capture as an MPEG, how do I do that??
(3) I want to edit the video once I capture it on my laptop (cut some
parts, add transitions, title, etc...). Does this make a difference
if I should capture as an AVI or MPEG?? Again, which of the above
software should I use for this?

Thanks.

[Tommy]

Adobe is considered by many the best video editing software available, but its expensive. If you have it i would use it.

When your using a firewire card your not capturing. What your actually doing is transfering. The video is already in a digital format. So as you could save the AVI (DV) video in mpeg form it will not transfer in mpeg.

I would keep the video in avi edit it and then convert to mpeg. As far as video goes AVI (DV) video is big, about 18 minutes will take about 4gb.

8)

[$$$]

CyberLink's PowerVCR claims to capture (i.e. transcode) your DV footage to MPEG1/2:
http://www.gocyberlink.com/english/products/features.jsp?ProdId=20&ProdVerId=10&SeqId=46

However, don't expect great quality. With MPEG video you are definitely limited when it comes to editing as you could only cut or merge without quality loss.

$

[Ashtrader2000]

I'm using Pinnacle Studio to capture and edit. There's a nice feature in this program, that let's you first "capture" a preview (very small file size), which you then edit. Then when done, you transfer only the parts of the video, that are used in the final edit to your hard drive. For example if you have 30 minutes of raw footage, but only intend to end up with 5 min., you only need little more than 1 GB.

I don't know if other programs have this feature aswell, but I suspect they might. It's very usefull; I once had to edit a 30min show from 10 hours raw video. That would have cost me about 150 GB had I not used this feature! Using it, I only needed 7~8 GB!

As others have replied, you don't capture DV. You transfer. So there is only that one quality - filesize to chose. (True some programs let you "capture" in MPEG, but that's only realtime software encoding. Very bad quality, and not very suitable for editing!)

If you want to use your laptob for Video editing, I suggest purchasing a firewire kit for an IDE harddrive. The cheapest way to get an external firewire hard drive!

Ashtrader