DV passthrough quality, encoding

[skarloey]

I have a Canon ZR40 miniDV camcorder that has the DV passthrough capability to convert my old analog tapes to digital DV format. I have tried several things and need some advice. I have tried MovieXone, VideoWave III, VideoWave V, and DVD Movie Factory (even before these I had tried TV Wonder VE to "digitize" my home video without satisfactory results). MovieXone and VideoWave appear to require you to press the "play" button on the camcorder to capture anything which does not work with passthrough. DVD Movie Factory gives me an error when trying to capture to mpg so I used MS Movie Maker to capture to AVI(DV) and then encoded that to true DV through DVD Movie Factory. When watching the video on my home DVD player and TV, the encoding was very poor with lots of frame hesitation.

Does anyone have any advice to get high quality?
Do I need to find a way to capture directly to mpg format?
Should DVD Movie Factory be able to do this?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[ahfairley]

I have captured pass-though using the Vegas Video Capture from the ZR40 with no problems or dropped frames. You do need to make sure your're capturing to a defragmented disk, as that will make a difference. I have a partition I capture to that I format before major captures.

One thing I had to do with VV Capture for pass-though to work was to go into "preferences" and turn off camera control via the program. With it on, the program was telling me I had no tape in the camera. With it off, I could just press the capture button in the program and start the playback on the analog cam hooked into the ZR40. I don't know if something similar is required in the programs you mentioned.

Good luck,

Alan

[G-man]

I have a ZR40 and am getting excellent results.

DVD Movie Factory has a bug that prevents passthru capture from this camera. I use EditStudio3 from www.puremotion.com to do the capture
(free trial & capture still works after trial period has expired).

I then use TMPGEnc/Plus to do Encodes to MPEG; will also do basic editing
(free trial from www.pegasys-inc.com). It give better results than the MPEG encoder built into DVD MovieFactory.

I then use DVD MovieFactory to create menus and burn. Hint: use MFSCENE.EXE to assist in selecting menu thumbnails (download from http://stevemiller.net/downloads/MFScene.zip)