DV Camera to DVD plus Firewire Card Help.

[Sikander]

I have a Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz processor, an intel D865 GBF mother board and 752 MB of Ram running a Windows XP SP2 OS. My problem is, I recently bought a Canon ZR850 MiniDV Camcorder. I bought a Firewire card and cable to transfer the video to my pc, the problem starts here.
The card is working fine and I can transfer video from my camera easily to the computer. But since I've installed the card (its a PCI card with four USB ports and 2 Firewire ports), my windows startup is messy. The first time it installed, i restarted and the startup was fine. After that, when I start my computer, the icons and taskbar shows up but nothing responds, I can't click on anything. I have to press Ctrl plus Alt plus Del, and then end task the "explorer" and then when I start a new "explorer" everything starts working but my taskbar programmes don't launch, I have to launch them manually. I thought it was because i have a 350 watt power supply and there is less power so i disabled two other PCI cards I have, then i removed this card and started the pc, but sometimes it boots up normally, sometimes not. Any clue what it is? drivers? power supply? a bad card? what?

Also, I transfered video using Nero vision express 3, and I don't know which option to choose while recording the video from the camera, DV or DVD??? I want to record the video to my hard disk and then create a DVD video disc, so which option should I choose and is there a better programme then Nerovision to do this?
Plus, the same problem everyone has, Im new to this so im still learning, I get horizontal lines during fast motion and also jerks at times in the recorded video, plus it might be nothing but I noticed that the recorded video is a bit fast when I recorded in "DVD" mode. Do I need more Ram or a better video card? I have the onboard Intel Extreme graphic card.
Thank You.

[aedipuss]

as for the card you might try the manufacturers website for a newer driver. if there isn't one you can try uninstalling the card/reinstalling the driver from device manager.

winXP can take up to 5 minutes looking for new things, polling ports, etc... on boot with "explorer" just let it finish - check using task manager, when system idle process is 98% or so it's done.

to transfer miniDV tape use winDV it's free and gives you the DV avi file from the tape. don't use nero. don't use nero. for anything.

get a real encoder to go from DV avi to DVD mpeg2. check the guides here for suggestions on free ones or get something like vegas, cce, tmpgenc, procoder, etc.

[Sikander]

Thanks for the reply. I'm going to figure out the firewire card thing somehow, I'm going for a system backup, format and fresh install of windows so I hope the card won't give me problems after that, it's been a long time since I last did that.

You ask me not to use Nero because of bad capturing quality? I've been using nero 6 for a long time for burning Cd's and DVD's and it works fine, don't know how good it is at capturing. Isn't there any good programme that will let me record Dv video from the camcorder and transcode it to DVD in real time so that I don't have to encode it again to burn a dvd? like nero vision does? If there is a good one, please tell me, it doesn't matter even if I have to buy it if there's no free alternative.
Also, I wanted to know if Adobe Premiere lets me capture video also or just edit and burn it? Because I think adobe premiere is the most expensive software out there for these purposes, it has to be good.
Also, how much role does my video card play during all this process? capturing and encoding video? Will getting a better video card improve my final dvd video result because I think this onboard intel graphic chipset doesn't have much brawn.
Thanks.

[aedipuss]

the only thing you need to capture miniDV from your cam is the free program winDV. there isn't anything better. programs like premiere and vegas can capture but they are suites that do editing and encoding mainly. there are free alternatives you can try first, read some of the guides on this site. for dvd burning download and start using the free program imgburn.

a new graphics card won't change the results at all as all processing is done by the cpu, but it may speed up editing and previews if there is noticeable lag or jerky display of video.

[tinker]

Premier is good it will let you capture through firewire and otput to DVD.
If you want to invest so much, than check Vegas, all my friends tell me it is better than Premier.
Your video card has nothing to do with capture quality since you are going to use firewire.

[Sikander]

Okay Thanks for the replies. I tried WinDv and it's really good, amazing how these small executables can do the thing better than those HUGE suites.
1. Now I wanted to know if I necessarily need to capture in DV first, then transode to MPEG 2 and then burn, can't I just record to hard disk in MPEG2 in realtime?
2. If i get more Ram for my system, will that improve my capturing and/or transcoding?
3. Windv asks me to either capture video in Type1 or Type2 mode, what's the difference? which one is better? Plus, I captured in type 1 and it didn't play in VLC media player, gave an error, type 2 did play fine in VLC, and both play in Windows media player.
Thanks.

[aedipuss]

1 - no. too great a chance of dropped frames.

2 - maybe, but not necessarily - only if windows is swapping things into and out of the paged file on disk. during encoding a good upgrade choice is 2 separate hard drives - one to use as source and one for destination.

3 - type 2 is the choice needed for most editing programs.