Digital camcorders - some questions

[merkin]

Hi all

I'm thinking about getting my family a digital camcorder for Christmas but have a question first...

The Sony digital camcorders come with firewire / i.link output. Does this mean that I will be able to link it to my firewire port on the pc, 'download' the video to my hard drive and edit with some video editing software without having to use a capture card? I do have a capture card but I find it tiresome trying to capture in 'real time', also the quality isn't great. I'd just like to know exactly how you get the video from the digital camcorder to the hard drive.... am I right in thinking that because it's digital, there is no need for the whole 'capturing' process? Just download the file (DV mpeg I think) from the camcorder to the hard drive and away you go...

The reason I ask is that I've never been able to capture analog video using my capture card above 352 horizontal res. My problem is very similar to that of a post recently in here, loads of artifact-lines flick up on the screen. The guy in the post fixed this by changing PCI slots, unfortunately I can't really do that. What I'd like to know is am I likely to experience similar problems with DV or is it a much more stable process?

Can anyone help?

Thanks,
Merkin

[EricB]

Yes. The conversion to digital is done in the camera and you are transferring that to the computer through the firewire. You can edit using any number of programs that support DV like Adobe Premiere, ULEAD Video Studio, Pinnacle Studio, etc. DV is stable and gets rid of a lot of the problems you may have experienced with trying to capture / convert.

[videojoe]

I just recently purchaced the sony trv-340 and am very happy with it. To send video to the PC all you will need is a firewire port on the computer and the appropriate software (freeware for DV capture can be found in the tools section). You still capture in real time, but with no dropped frames or audio sync issues and at full resolution (720x480 NTSC) It really is pretty painless. I have also used mine to convert VHS to SVCD with amazing results. At least as good as the analog cards I have used with none of the headaches. I was capturing video within 10 minutes of bringing the camera home. You will need editing software if you want to add effects and such. I simply grab the DV from the camera and then encode to SVCD with TMPEnc. Perfect results every time. I have encoded about 8-10 hours of video already with NO issues.

Buy it, you won't regret it

[merkin]

Ok thanks for the answers guys! So the fact that I couldn't capture analog video over 352 horizontal res shouldn't prove a problem with DV?

[videojoe]

You don't even have the option of a lower capture resolution with DV. You get full resolution/full bitrate all the time. It will take about 13GB per hour of video. If you are not running windows 2000 or XP (with harddrive formatted in NTFS) you will not be able to capture more than 4gb at a time. the FAT32 filesystem doesn't allow it for some reason. Windows 95, 98, and ME can only be formatted as FAT 16 (2gb file limit) or FAT 32(4 gb file limit).

[yg1968]

Most Sony digital have a passthrough feature which means that you can basically use your camcorder to capture VHS and other analog stuff. Avoid the TRV-140 as it does not have a "video in" or a passthrough feature.