Using laptop as viewfinder

[DanaT]

I use a laptop as a large viewfinder for my video camera, and I also send the camera output directly to a IEEE-1394 drive, bypassing tape entirely. But there are a few things I would like to find to make the system even better. Is there a WinXP compatible capture program that has the following attributes:

1. Expands the capture monitor window to cover most of the screen,

2. Can capture directly to disk (videocam is in "camera", not "playback" mode),

3. Shows zebra stripes in overexposed areas (preferably lets me define "overexposed").

I am using a Sony Vaio PCG-GR370 laptop (256MB ram, 1.133GHz PIII) with various FireWire drives, and various digital videocams (for better shoots I rent a Canon GL2). The DVGate Motion software that came with the laptop allows me to expand the monitor window to full screen, but this software drops lots of frames when it closes one 2GB file and opens the next (this stupid software does this even on NTFS partitions, where there is no file size limit!! And Sony provides it on their WinXP systems!). Ulead MovieFactory captures fine, but its monitor window is ridiculously small -- they waste all the screen real estate on stuff of little interest during the capture phase. A friend has Premier, but didn't find the features I was looking for (but Premier is a complicated-enough program that it's easy to overlook some of its capabilities).

So far I have two programs, each of which does only one of the 3 things I want. Does anyone know of a program that will do at least the first two?

Thanks,

DanaT

[flaninacupboard]

i use DVapp, which gives a full size preview while capping (so 720x480/576) and will happily write any incoming DVstream to disk, either type one or type two, with no file size limitation. it runs quite happily on my 800mhz machine.

however, no zebra stripes - sorry.

[MpegEncoder]

DanaT, your laptop is a bit wimpy for this process. Capturing the incoming video is fairly CPU intensive, especially if you want to scale it up to full screen (or near full screen). You are bound to start dropping some frames.

WinDV can resize the "preview" to just about any size you want. But, like I said above, to capture the video reliably you'll need a more powerful system.

[flaninacupboard]

i disagree 100% with that!
using DVapp my 800mhz C3 processor (so roughly equivalent to a P2-500) never drops a frame. the preview may slow down occasionally but every single frame gets written to disc.