WinDV - Stop capture at tape end?

[stantheman1976]

I'm capturing from some newly recorded tapes and WinDV keeps going after the footage is over and tape is still playing. Is there an option I'm missing for it to stop capture when the footage and timecode are over?

[Safesurfer]

Do you have the DV Control checkbox (to the right of the Config button) checked, this enables WinDV to control the camcorder?

[gadgetguy]

I wouldn't use the DV control checkbox as there is a bug that iirc causes problems with the audio. It's been a while since I tried it, so I could be wrong, but I think if you have the discontinuity threshold set to 1 or more, then it will stop capturing when no timecode is present. (Of course it will also spit scenes into separate files, too)

[stantheman1976]

I do have the box checked. I have the threshold at 0 so that probably what's going on. If the tape is one recording from start to finish then it should only be one scene right? So if I set the threshold to 1 it should stop capture when the timecode ends and be one scene?

Is the audio problem mentioned where it doesn't capture the audio sometimes? I've had that happen a few times. It usually happens if I let WinDV start the camera and capture at the same time. Usually if I start the tape manually and then start capture while it's already playing it works fine.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Try seeing what the file contains. Like our software, WinDV uses the DirectShow framework to do the grunt work of capturing a frame from a DV camcorder and adding it to an AVI file. In our case, if you start capturing a tape and leave the room then come back sometime later beyond the end of the recorded portion of the tape, it will seem as if the capturing process is on-going but when you stop it and look at the captured file, you will find the file only contains video from the recorded portion of the tape.

[gadgetguy]

If the tape is one continuous recording without a pause or stop anywhere in the process then setting the discontinuity threshold to 1 should still result in one file for all of the footage. If you were recording over a few hours, but stopping and starting the recoding several times throughout, then you will end up with multiple files, one for each "scene". If none of the breaks were longer than say, five minutes, then you could set the DT to over 300 seconds (5 minutes) and it should still result in one file for the whole session. Setting it to zero just makes it ignore the timecode when determining when to split the file, and in my experience will continue to record even though there is no more actual footage. IIRC it just holds/repeats the last valid frame.

[stantheman1976]

When leaving it at 0 the capturing process will keep going and the end of the file will be just the last frame showing continuously. It's easy to chop off when I editing but it makes for a larger file size than it should be.

I have 6 tapes total from last night. 2 segments from 3 angles. All are new tapes recorded with no break. I set the threshold at 1 for a tape that just finished and it still kept going after the timecode end. I'm going to try a larger number and see if it works right.

[edDV]

WinDV does not respond well to a full hard disk. First you get lost frames as it chases open fragmented sectors, then it stops leaving an open file ~xxx.avi

[stantheman1976]

The disk is not full. I started with 97GB free and haven't had dropped frames. I set the threshold to 5 seconds and that worked.