DV Capturing from Video Camera

[wayned16]

Im a n00b to this, but learn fast . My dad has just brought a Digtal Video camera. The JVC GR-D31, it has a DV connector on the camera but I have no DV connector on my PC, nor the DV Cable. I was wondering what hardware and software i should get, to be able to transfer the data off the camera to the PC. The camera does come with its own software but is this what im looking for i haven't used it yet so im not sure what it is capable of. Once on the PC i want to convert it to put it on DVD, I already have DVD conversion skills i.e. DVD 2 DVD so this part shouldn't be a problem. But what format is the video/audio when transfered to the PC?, the camera is able to produce 48khz 16bit stereo sound so i know that part.

Also i live in the UK so if anyone has any online suppliers for the equipment i need please share. Im looking at around £100 all in for the hardware.

PC specs - Look at the pc specs button.

Main use of the camera, Hoilday footage. So i don't need state of the art Capture card.

Also 2 other question, are all DV Cables capatible with any equipment. I understand there is a 4 pin and a 6 pin version? Is there a cable on the market that is DV one end and USB the other end?

Thanks

Sum it up

I need

1) DV Cable
2) DV Capture Card
3) Software recommendations.

[Tommyknocker]

Since you have the good sense to stay away from USB, do not worry about a USB-DV conversion. If your camera has a 4-pin DV port, you will need a 4-pin to 6-pin firewire cable. The capture card, in this case, is a simple firewire card. You should have spent around $30-40.00 so far.

Now for software. This is where you will have to do some research. But check the Tools section at left for DV capture software. Download all the free DV capture software for now. You are learning, so we will try to keep your overhead low for now.

Finally, the DV coming from the camera is an AVI form.

[SVCDummy]

Also expect the resultant AVI files you down load from the camera/DVtape to be about 15Gbytes per hour of tape.

Best to do the downloads with WinXP if you are using a windows based PC. The file sizes are going to be more than any of the WIn9X/ME versions can handle.

[wayned16]

shit thats a lot of disk space good job i got 100GB and winxp pro Thanks for the help.

Seems it is in Avi format i can put that straight into Cinema craft encoder right to covert to MPEG2 DVD

Also can someone recommend any firewire cards in the UK.

[bugster]

Also can someone recommend any firewire cards in the UK.

All you should really need is the cheapest. If you are happy ordering online then try a few places such as:

http://www.scan.co.uk/
http://www.dabs.com/home.asp
http://online.stak.com/cgi-bin/stak/

There are plenty of others but I have used all 3 of the above suppliers with no problems.

[wayned16]

found a good one at dabs. £15, 3 ports, comes with cable and software. What more could you ask for.

Lucent Firewire 3 Port PCI + Cyberlink

but i seen this one Firewire IEEE 1394 PCI Card £29.37 and it mentions Digital Video Format MPEG-2, does this mean it captures straight to Mpeg2?
http://www.dabs.com/products/prod-info3-info.asp?&m=y&quicklinx=2FK9

because this would be a big help as i want to put them straight onto DVD-R.

[Richard_G]

Go for the cheap one. Looking at the picture of the card you mention, there doesn't seem to be enough on it to give mpeg hardware compression. dabs descriptions aren't always as accurate as they could be. DV is always .avi format and it is much better to edit in .avi before converting to mpeg. Even if you don't intend doing any clever editting, you may wish to chop bits of your holiday videos out and editting mpeg is the best way known to lose video/audio sync!

[rhegedus]

PC World will have the hardware, and XP has movie maker built in so you've got basic software already installed.

Sometimes you also get capture and edit software with the firewire card.