Automated Process - DV Camcorder to DVD?

[Peench]

Thanks for the follow up info. I didn't have time the last few nights, but I'm going to give it a go tonight and see what I can come up with. I'll let you all know how it turns out. If it doesn't work smoothly tonight then that will be the third strike and I'll likely end up buying a stand-alone DVD burner and going that route for now.

[Peench]

Alright so I tried it with WinDV again after stopping virtually every process running on my machine. It still gave me slow downs and loss of audio in places and still told me it dropped 90 frames.

It wasn't too late yet so I started up Ulead again and told it to capture the video as DV. It seems to have captured it all, but I didn't have a chance to try any editing and/or make any menus or anything. I also didn't have a chance to see if the dropouts were present. I'll have to check that out sometime this week as my evenings are full of meetings!

Hopefully this works. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

[thecoalman]

Try defragging if it persists. Of the two times that I can think of that I have experienced dropped frames one was when it was reaching the capacity of the drive, the other was when I had a really fragmented drive. In both cases it was looking for a place to write the data.

Capturing DV is not that system intensive. I even surf the net, email, all kinds of stuff while capturing DV.

[gadgetguy]

Try what thecoalman suggested, if that doesn't work scan your system for spyware or virus's that might be mimicking system processes.
Also what type of hard drives are you using? I have a problem capturing to the SATA drive on my system. The SATA controller on my motherboard causes periodic delays that interfere with the 'capture' process. (Others don't have this problem and it appears to be limited to specific vintages of certain motherboards.) If you are capturing to a SATA drive try capturing to an IDE drive and see if that makes any difference.

[Peench]

I thought it was odd too. The drive itself is a dedicated data drive that hasn't had these portions of the drive written on yet. Its got a good 50+ gigs left on it that have never been touched. I could defrag and see if that works, but I can't imagine it will be that fragmented.

I don't use this computer very often so I don't pick up too many things, but I do run my antivirus and 3 different malware/adware detection utilities to clean it up weekly. You can never be too safe in this regard in my opinion.

Fortunately the capture with the Ulead software worked perfectly. Their simple movie creation utility worked fairly well as well. I could not, however, easily cut portions of the video - probably because I didn't know what I was doing. With Pinnacle I could choose a segment and it would bring up a seperate cutting utility where I could slowly edit each portion of the video. With Ulead I guess I'm forced to do the cutting with the slider tabs in the main window? It was also a bit difficult to cut in the middle of the video since it was one large avi file I was working with. I guess if I read over some documentation I should be able to figure out how to make cuts and edits in the middle of video.

So I set it all up last night to burn the DVD with a menu and chapters and whatnot and it did it all while I was sleeping. Apparently it took about 3 hours to get it all done, but it wrote to the DVD successfully (or so it told me when I work up this morning). I haven't had a chance to check out the disc yet but I'll try to do that tonight if I have time.

I'm also intrigued by WinDV as a utility to capture "live" video feeds. But that's a topic for another discussion I imagine.

Thanks again for all of your help. It looks like the crash I experienced with Ulead initially was a fluke since it seems to be working fine now. Now if I can figure out how to do some simple editing this software might suit me pretty well for this purpose. Any reading you all can suggest in this regard? Thanks!

[Peench]

gadgetguy - sorry for not answering your question in my last post. The drive itself is an ATA drive. I think its a Western Digital 120GB. I have my OS and programs on a separate drive and use this one solely for data.

All things considered I'll probably see if it can be cleaned up regardless of whether I'm using WinDV or not. Thanks again for the suggestions and the possible issues.

[thecoalman]

Another thing to check is that the drive is DMA mode. Start>Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager> Exapand Ide/ATA controllers right click Primary Ide channel and select properties.

I'm also intrigued by WinDV as a utility to capture "live" video feeds. But that's a topic for another discussion I imagine.

You should be able to that as well with VS. Instead of turning the cam on to VCR switch it to Record. The feed should show up in the capture window. It won't capture until you hit the capture button. That is how it works for my cam and Ulead capture software. It may have to set something up in the cam menu but other than that it should work.

[Peench]

thecoalman,

I tried it out for a bit and got a test image. It seemed to work pretty well. It certainly offers a host of new and interesting possibilities. I hope it does not have the same issues recording live as it did trying to pull from that tape.

I will also check to make sure the drive is set to DMA mode. I really appreciate all the help you have provided!

[thecoalman]

I hope it does not have the same issues recording live as it did trying to pull from that tape.

It would, it's no different than if you recorded it to tape then transferred it to computer. It has the same data rate.