DV capturing?

[SonKun]

I just bought a sony dvrtrv18 and a IEEE 1394 (firewire) card and I am wondering exactly what programs to use for capturing with it. I tried the premiere dv capture thing just to see if it worked. It worked fine but I would like somthing with a little more features. Actualy I tried Vdub but I dont think it can capture in DV format? Also this camera has passthrough so I wondering about using it kinda like a capture card (my ati tv wonderVE just aint cuttin it) Does DV drop frames? I dont know to much about this dv thing but thats why I am turning to you. THANKS

[ncgoldwinger]

I have the Sony TRV27 and can say that the pass through works very well on these units. One thing to note is that you will have to remove the tape from the camera or it will go into "sleep" mode after a few minutes of non use.
I use a variety of programs to capture with from Studio 8 to Vegas Video 3. Capturing DV footage to the hard drive will only consume 13 GB per hour verses as much as 1 GB per MINUTE in analog thru your ATI card. Because of the increased speed of the firewire port and the decreased amount of hard drive storage necessary you should not have any problems with dropped frames if you have a relatively fast system. Another nice thing is that since the audio and video are being captured thru the same port it virtually eliminates any synch problems. Even though I run an AMD XP2100 I always turn off or disable all my programs that load at startup plus turn off any screensaver to allow full system resources to the capture process.
FYI you will need to capture to a drive that is formatted in NTFS to get past the 4GB limit of FAT32.
I just recently bought a Pioneer 104 and can't wait to transfer some of my footage to DVD..

Enjoy your new TRV18!

Regards..
Rick

[Bondiablo]

Try Scenalyzer Live www.scenalyzer.com and if your drive isn't formatted NTFS just set a maximum file size and it will automatically start a new file when the limit is reached. I keep right on working in other programs during my captures and still don't drop any frames.

[SonKun]

Yes I have XP with NTFS partioning. With a 120Gb Maxtor Hdd. Thats realy great to know 13GB per hour is just great. Thanks for all of your help. But still what program do you think I should use to capture? Studio 8? I wish I could use v-dub but I dont think I can capture with it? Please correct me on this.

[Bondiablo]

No VirtualDub doesn't work for capturing/transferring DV. As I said above try Scenalyzer Live as your capture software. There's also a freeware program called DVIO which works well if you don't want ANY features other than capture.

[vhelp]

All's you need to know, for DV stuff, is:
* frames - displays frames as it "transfers" video over DV.
* drops - will show you how many frames had droped, if any (ever)
* capture size - in Gigs. (actually its total accumilation of DV, progressively

..at least, this is all I need to know in my DV endeavors.

The above is provided when you use DVIO. I use it all the time. My only
beaf is I have Windows 98, and 4gig / 18 minute limit. But, for TV shows
and so on, it's ok, as I'm stopping during commercials anyways. But, I
wouldn't mind just leaving it to its work for 1 hour, using my ADVC-100.

If you use Scenalyzer, (demo or trial) it will put a logo, 5 frames, every
so many frames, like --- . . . --- . . . --- . . . if you get my drift.

-vhelp
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Happy HOLIDAY all.