Software for live Capture from DV Camera

[i-ball]

Hi,

I'm a newbie here and wondering if anyone here can help. I'm looking for a very simple windows XP software (preferably freeware) that can record directly onto the hard drive or flash memory stick from a DV video camera through firewire.
Is it even possible?
All I need is a simple software to do that at one click with option of configuring the quality so it would not consume so much hard drive space. I do not need to edit the video clips. Just a straight forward record, stop and play.

Thanks in advance for any helpful replies.

ian

[Richard_G]

Transferring DV over Firewire is just that, a file transfer, just like copying from an external hard drive. Assuming your camcorder is capable and does output DV while recording (some of the cheaper ones don't and only output to the Firewire port during playback), any DV transfer software will do it. If you have Windows Movie Maker, it will do it, or, if you prefer something a bit simpler, download WinDV.

You will not be able to configure the quality as it is a file transfer. You will get a DV .avi file with the video resolution set at full frame DV (720 x 576 for UK PAL). This will take up approximately 13GB of hard drive space for each hour of video.

[Michael33]

CaptureFlux at https://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=CaptureFlux
It will do exactly what you want, if your camera can output a live image in play or record mode (my Canon Optura 50 has live output in record mode only.)
Paul Glagla's software is free for non-commercial purposes and I use it and trust it 100% (for what that's worth). It even has live capture to Divx!

[i-ball]

Thank you Michael. I will try that. I did find Stoik which worked fine except the Codec that worked to a reasonable quality produced huge file sizes. I will try your suggestion with DivX.

[i-ball]

I have a problem with DIVX capture and Audio not in sync. Any ideas or suggestions?

[greymalkin]

hello,

you should really do the capturing/encoding in two different steps as trying to capture from dv and encode to divx at the same time is going to be veeery taxing on your system and is probably why you are seeing these audio/video sync. issues.

The best thing for you to do would be to use a program like WinDV to transfer the video via firewire to your pc hard drive. As was stated previously, this is going to give you a dv .avi which is approximately 13gb per hour. Then you can encode to mpeg2 and burn to dvd or divx and watch on your computer. You'd probably be better off just encoding to mpeg2 and burning to dvd if you're worried about hard drive space and want the best quality.

Another thing that can cause audio/video sync issues is if you capture to the same drive as your system drive. You should have a system drive with your OS on it, then a second large hard drive to capture your video files to.