miniDV tapes to hard drive. Uncompressed, full quality. How?

[vid83]

If I wanted to transfer home videos from my miniDV tapes to a hard drive in full quality (uncompressed), how would I do that?
The only thing that would be added to each video would be a black video at the beginning of the video that would just be a title page to identify the content of the video and the date that the video was shot (too bad video don't have something similar to digital photo EXIF files). Also maybe edit out any unnecessary footage but no transitions or effects would be added.

[gadgetguy]

Technically, your video is already somewhat compressed on the tape. Use WinDV to capsfer over firewire. This will store an exact copy of what's on the tape in an avi container. Edit unwanted footage with VirtualDub with Video and Audio set to Direct Stream Copy. You can also add your "tag" clip in VDub as long as it's the same format as your video.

[filmboss80]

1. Capture from the camcorder's firewire (IEEE 1394) port to the firewire port on your computer. If your computer does not have such a port, you can get a firewire PCI card for $25 and under. The capturing software should be WinDV (a solid and free utility that can be downloaded from the Tools section of this site.)

2. Pure, unadulterated mini-dv tapes produce DV avi files on your computer. There are many video editing programs that will cut these videos just fine. (Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, etc. have low-cost, consumer versions. See a list in the Tools section.) These include easy-to-make titles and black leader. A free, cuts-only program is VirtualDub, though you will need to also install a DV codec, such as the Panasonic DV Codec or the Cedocida DV codec -- but just load one, not both. (Let's avoid codec conflicts.)

Understand that DV-AVI, while very flexible for editing, will take up a lot of disc space. That is why many people take their finished editing projects and encode to DVD, Divx/Xvid, etc.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Given the description of what you want to do, I would use Windows Movie Maker for the whole process. For simple cuts, you don't need anything else and the edited files will contain bit-for-bit identical video data (since you are doing nothing but simple cuts). Capturing from your camcorder is integrated into WMM, too. I often use WMM in deference to Vegas etc when I need to do something quick and simple - it's like Notepad for video - looked down upon but bloody useful at times.

BTW, DV tapes *do* have information such as recording time/date, shutter speed, white balance, iris etc. Even closed captions.

[filmboss80]

Forgot all about Windows Movie Maker, which would be fine for simple editing. However -- just make sure your project is saved as a DV-AVI video, not the default WMV file (which is highly compressed).