external hard drive to capture to?

[safaje]

Hi..
My laptop does not have enough space to transfer the video to from my minidv camera...
i tried using windows movie maker and want to transfer the files to avi before copying it to DVD...
so i was wondering... Is it possible to save it to my external hard drive? and then from there use another software to convert and burn it to DVD?

thanks
Safa

[schematic2]

yes, if its a usb2 hard drive.

[redwudz]

You can give it try. DV needs about 3.6 MB/s transfer rate, well within the USB 2.0 specs. But USB is not a great interface for large file transfers. However, with a laptop, your options are limited.

I would try WinDV with a FireWire interface to the computer, transferring that from the computer to the USB HDD in real time. WinDV is a bit more 'trimmed down' than WMM for that usage. If it won't work with your external drive, probably nothing else will.

USB output from a camcorder is usually a poor choice as most camcorders output a low quality from the USB camcorder interface. I've used a FireWire PCMCIA card with my laptop, then transferred that via USB 2.0 to an external USB HDD on the fly with some success.

Once you have the DV on a hard drive, there are many ways to convert it to a DVD. A MPEG encoder like the freeware HC is one choice. I would do all editing in the DV format, then convert. After conversion you will need to author the MPEG to DVD format. GUI for dvdauthor is one freeware solution for that.

BTW, DV is AVI, DV-AVI to be correct.