Video Capture

[Doomguy]

What is the best video capture program to get video out of my Sony DCR-TRV340 ntsc camera into my pc to make a DVD? The program that came with it does a crap job as well as Sonic My DVD? Can anyone help?

[pijetro]

Can't speak for everybody else, but Scenalyzer ( in the tools section), is fantastic. It's great for batch capturing. Hook up your camera, and just index..
After 'bout 5 minutes, the scenes where you've stopped and started recording are flagged, and you tick which ones get loaded into your 'puter. Just hit batch capture and walk away. Only the scenes you want get transferred.....

As far as I can recall, Sonic MyDVD captures and converts directly into .MPG format, whereas many capture utilities capture in DV .AVI....
Remember, once you've transferred your .AVI, it will have to encode for DVD .mpg...That'll be your next adventure....You could let MyDVD do it for you by selecting one of the quality options and encode overnight.....

[callatis]

I have a Sony TRV 720 and I use firewire for video capturing. As I purchased the Pinnacle Studio DV 6 kit, the best capture I get is with it’s own software, Pinnacle Studio DV. I tried using other apps for video capturing but Studio DV is the only one who doesn’t loose frames.
So, if you use firewire try using the software that came with, if you got one.

[pijetro]

That's great for you. But Sonic MyDVD, isn't intended for .AVI capture. It's basically a beginners DVD authouring tool. Although, I must admit, I love their motion menus.

As for the software that comes bundled with your burner, camcorder, or whatever, there's plenty of people on these forums that purchase the hardware, and toss out the software that came bundled.....


Oskiweewee

[callatis]

I wasn’t talking about the software bundled with your DVD burner. I got Sonyc MyDVD as well, and indeed, it sucks.
I am talking about the software bundled with the firewire card. For me, this is the best combination, Pinnacle firewire and Pinnacle Studio DV for capturing only.
After that I use Premiere 6 for video editing, TMPGEnc for converting to MPG2 and Ulead Studio Factory 2 for mastering my DVD. Lots of steps but I get what I need.

[Bic]

I have this camera as well. It came with pixela. I tried to copy a tape to the hard drive and it stoped at 14 min. or so an said no more hard drive space. There was about 7 gig left. I was using the usb cable that came with it would that cause this problem? Did your camera come with pixela? Do i have to get fire wire?

[callatis]

Firewire is the way to go. You may buy the card only but you may fall into my problem. As I said before, the best capturing I am doing is using the firewire and the bundled software.
Your 14 min are a total of 4GB? Are you using Win98? You should use NTFS, W2K or WinXP.

[Metaluna]

I use either Scenalyzer Live ($33) or WinDV (free) to capture to Type 2 AVI. I mainly capture from VHS tapes using a Firewire DV converter (Canopus ADVC-100) so I can't comment on Scenalyzer's DV indexing features, though they look cool. WinDV seems to work better for timed captures though (i.e. when you want to capture for some length of time then stop), so I've been using that more often lately. They are both very solid programs that do not drop frames. With the lengths of video I'm using, I usually end up with a 20-30GB Type 2 AVI file. I use AVISynth to crop, filter, trim, and frameserve the video into TMPGEnc for encoding. I've mainly been using DVDLab for authoring.

[spiderman2k1]

If your camera is Firewire you just need a firewire card. If you want a real time capture card get Dazzle 2 pci card you can read more at www.dazzlegeek.com to see if it works with your mother board or WinPVr 250 or 350 ATI AIW is oh ok if you get one cheep. The great thing about real time capture card's you can make DVD very fast and not have to encode use MPEG2VCR the fastest MPEG2 editter. Also this is a tip if you need to get more then a hour of video on one DVD-R cap at 8000 cbr make your vob files then run it with dvd2one to make it fit on dvd-r. Keep in mind if you work with AVI file's over firewaire. it might take you two day to encode two hours of video