Panasonic PV-GS120 Bad Firewire Port (edited: correct Model)

[greymalkin]

Well I bought a PV-GS120 second-hand and it has a bad firewire port...i'm pretty sure it's had it all the time..the guy who had it before me used it at school and always used their miniDV decks so my attempt was the first time at using it...after doing some more searching I found that this has happened ALOT with this model..apparently they put a really sorry firewire port in there or the installation process was bad....

Anyways...I have spend a good bit of this afternoon feeling very depressed and now i was trying to scour my options. My brother-in-law has a cannon ZR-100 miniDV camera and I know his firewire works fine so worst case scenario I can borrow his when my tapes are filled up...

My other question is...If I capture the video through the s-video port (as an uncompressed avi through my theater 550 using virtuadub) and watch it on a regular tv will I be able to tell a big difference? I recorded some things and watched them through the S-Video port directly to my television and I thought it looked really good...Supposing I use a good MPEG2 encoder what do I stand to lose? I also capture the audio using my Audigy2 so I can record straight to 16-bit/48khz.

thanks

[FulciLives]

Depending on the capture or recording device you will not be able to see a difference ... at least not a noticeable difference ... doing a firewire out vs a S-Video out.

One example of this was a thread (a good 1 1/2 years ago now me thinks) where someone tested this by using direct firewire out from a DV cam to the computer vs S-Video out from the cam to a Canopus ADVC-100 which processed the analog video to DV format then to the computer. The two looked very nearly identical and at times the Canopus looked slightly better but at other times the direct firewire method looked better but even then it was splitting hairs.

However if you want to do any editing on a computer it is probably best to use DV format and since the Canopus ADVC-100 is very expensive (about $250+) you might want to get your DV cam firewire port fixed (assuming it is cheaper than $250 to do so) or if you are happy to just dump it to DVD MPEG-2 then buy a stand alone DVD recorder and use the S-Video out of the cam to the recorder ... again no quality difference there vs direct firewire out from cam.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[edDV]

Well I bought a DV-PS120 second-hand and it has a bad firewire port...i'm pretty sure it's had it all the time..the guy who had it before me used it at school and always used their miniDV decks so my attempt was the first time at using it...after doing some more searching I found that this has happened ALOT with this model..apparently they put a really sorry firewire port in there or the installation process was bad....

Do You mean GS-120? I don't see a PS. The 3CCD GS-120 is a good camcorder.
Is the connector physically broken or just not being detected?

My other question is...If I capture the video through the s-video port (as an uncompressed avi through my theater 550 using virtuadub) and watch it on a regular tv will I be able to tell a big difference? I recorded some things and watched them through the S-Video port directly to my television and I thought it looked really good...Supposing I use a good MPEG2 encoder what do I stand to lose? I also capture the audio using my Audigy2 so I can record straight to 16-bit/48khz.

S-Video can produce good results as said above. For the differences to be great, you would need a higher end camcorder with better lens but DV will still have advantages in these ways.

- no A/D, D/A cycle on Y(luminance)
- no A/D, NTSC encode, NTSC decode, D/A cycle on U and V. Chroma will be softer.*
- Sound may go non-sync and/or delayed due to Audigy2 processing time.
- more HDD space required for uncompressed capture.

For that camera section, the quality differences will be small.

* sometimes softer chroma is a good thing, as when using a DV camcorder for chroma key foreground.

[greymalkin]

I'm sorry guys it is PV-GS120..it was late at night when I wrote that..it's the lower end 3CCD camcorder...it does look beautiful too .

Can i capture straight to DV format in VirtuaDub? If I have to capture full uncompressed AVI I can do that cause I've got an external 200gb.

I'm pretty sure the port is just fried...I heard alot of people on a panasonic board complaining about it...the only way to fix it is to replace the board for $600...thats more than I paid for the camera and all accessories so I will live without it...

thanks again for the encouragement!

[edDV]

I'm sorry guys it is PV-GS120..it was late at night when I wrote that..it's the lower end 3CCD camcorder...it does look beautiful too .

Can i capture straight to DV format in VirtuaDub? If I have to capture full uncompressed AVI I can do that cause I've got an external 200gb.

I'm pretty sure the port is just fried...I heard alot of people on a panasonic board complaining about it...the only way to fix it is to replace the board for $600...thats more than I paid for the camera and all accessories so I will live without it...

thanks again for the encouragement!

The GS120 isn't that old. It may be under warranty. DV transfer is still desireable.

If you go the capture card route I'd forget trying to realtime encode to DV (CPU intensive), just capture uncompressed (Low CPU but high disk transfer) or lossless Huffyuv (medium CPU load, lower disk transfer and consumption).
http://neuron2.net/www.math.berkeley.edu/benrg/huffyuv.html#Capturing

If you have room, capture first to an internal drive but not the OS partition if you can help it. The external disk may not be able to keep up.

You can always copy the file to the external drive after capture.

Realtime MPeg2 capture is possible with your ATI AIW 9000 Pro but quality will be lower than using the two step uncompressed capture followed by MPeg2 encode.

[greymalkin]

I believe panasonic only offers a 90 day mfg. warranty...and if I can work around the problem i'm really not that concerned about it.

i believe i'll capture w/ the huffYUV codec so I don't have such huge files to mess with. Would Adobe Premiere have any problem with this video file? I'm noticing when working with uncompressed avi's the playback is very choppy in adobe premiere although it plays fine in WMP. I am also noticing the rendering time is considerably higher with an uncompressed AVI. I can usually render to MPEG2 at or faster than real-time but this 30 minute, 33gb file is going to take 8 hours just to apply some brightness/contrast settings to and export to movie....after that I'll still have to compress to MPEG2 for burning to DVD.

I certainly plan on capturing to avi, editing, and then using a good mpeg compression software.

thanks again...