Mini DV Cam > FireWire port - Is that all I need?

[mkdevo]

i'm looking for the best possible way to capture from a friend's mini DV cam. looking for the highest quality, as these films are going to end up on dvd. i can plug the cam directly into my firewire port, but will i get better results using a separate card for the transfer? what software do i want to use for this? thanks in advance.

[Ashtrader2000]

Any firewire port will due. DV is about 4 MB per second. Any firewire port can transfer 50 MB per second (if I'm not mistaken, then firewire2 can transfer 100 MB/s), so just plug in the cam and capture.

You say you are looking for the highest quality; That's the great thing about DV. Transfer is lossless. You can only get one quality - the highest. it's the encoding afterwards, that matters!

As for software... Adobe Premiere is great, but you'll probably be more than satisfied with Pinnacle Studio!?! Studio has many of the nice features, and is VERY easy to use, where Premiere is more pro.! But get some trials and judge for yourself

Ashtrader

[bertmartin]

Yes firewire is the best way to input DV to your computer. This is just a digital transfer so there should be no quality loss. What you do with it after you get it in the computer is where the quality is lost. The firewire card sometimes comes with basic capture software or with WinXP Microsoft has the capture software with the OS I believe. Also a capture program called Sceneanalyzer is what a lot of people use. Do a search on Google. $33