Capturing to DV AVI without Firewire.

[mrtobor]

Hello All!
I'm new to this forum though I have read posts here from time to time.

Problem:
I, like many, have tons of random, raw family footage on analog 8mm tapes. I want to archive this to computer as-is, then draw from that archived footage to author some DVDs that someone might actually want to watch. So my desire is for the A/D transfers to retain as much quality of the original a possible. In other words, I'd like to keep any compression at a minimum until final (authored) output.

My plan was to connect my Hi8 camcorder to one of my MiniDV camcorders and use the latter's passthrough capability to digitize the video. This is great if your computer has a Firewire port. I'm currently shopping for a new laptop which i will use as a workstation on which to do all this. Trouble is, Firewire seems to have become obsolete. No new machine I've seen has it. I would like to capture and save in the DV AVI format for my archives, but I don't think USB 2.0 is fast enough for that. Any USB 3.0 capture devices out there yet? Any other ideas?

Thanks.
MrTobor

[yoda313]

Do you have an old desktop laying around? It would not need to be powerful at all and you could pop in a cheap pci card to do that.

Or another possibility is to ask a friend or neighbor with a firewire port to borrow it or see if you could setup time to do it yourself while they aren't using it.

Now I don't have a newer laptop (the only laptop I have is an ancient pentium 2 laptop that i really really don't use anymore) so i don't know if its still around but do you still have pcmcia slots? I'm sure they have firewire cards for those slots.

I don't think usb 2 would work with dv-avi. I don't know enough about usb 3 to speculate on that.

Good luck.

[edDV]

My plan was to connect my Hi8 camcorder to one of my MiniDV camcorders and use the latter's passthrough capability to digitize the video. This is great if your computer has a Firewire port. I'm currently shopping for a new laptop which i will use as a workstation on which to do all this. Trouble is, Firewire seems to have become obsolete. No new machine I've seen has it. I would like to capture and save in the DV AVI format for my archives, but I don't think USB 2.0 is fast enough for that. Any USB 3.0 capture devices out there yet? Any other ideas?

Thanks.
MrTobor

No USB 2 or 3 devices yet. Get a laptop with an Express Card slot and buy an IEEE-1394 adapter. Best to cap to a drive other than the OS drive so a laptop with two drives, or an external eSATA drive will work best. You will need a dual drive setup for optimal editing anyway.

[mrtobor]

Thanks folks for the ideas!
I did discover the Intensity Shuttle which is USB 3.0 capable. However, it's a bit on the pricey side. I think the PC card slot is probably a better option for me.

[edDV]

For the BM Shuttle be sure to read through the 450 post issues. It doesn't cap IEEE-1394.
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/323104-Intensity-Shuttle-Problem

[VideoTechMan]

This is one of those times where using an older computer is the way to go, as its obvious that newer is not always the best idea. I recently built an older XP box with an AMD single-core system with 2GB of RAM. I still had an PCI FW card that I was easily able to incorporate into this setup.

For laptop, I still have my dual-core Thinkpad T61 which has a built-in firewire port. If you want to do the work on your laptop, you may need to look into an older laptop which has the slots you need.

As for the BM Intensity Shuttle.....definitely not recommended. Not only pricey but tends to only work with certain motherboards, and lots of problems getting it to really work. Best to go with an older PC solution (which is preferred for analog-based work). You can still find PCI-PCIe Firewire cards on Newegg.

[dun4cheap]

It is easy to forget old available hardware. Many decent motherboards do still have firewire, I would check the manual. It may not have an external port but a header on the board.

There is also a usb2 solution that has been around for quite some time. Here is a link.

http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSite/us/Products/Consumer+Products/Home+Video/Studio+...version+14.htm

If offers, different input to output to usb2, such as firewire.

In any event I hope that helps. I have the older version of this box, but never really used the firewire on it as all my boards have firewire, including my recently purchased MSI I7 setup.

[Cornucopia]

If you want any kind of faithfulness to the original quality, I STRONGLY DO NOT recommend ANY USB (where 1.1, 2.0 or 3.0) alternative to using true Firewire (aka IEEE 1394).
It's not just a matter of transfer speed, it also has to do with the protocols, the DMA (direct memory access) which bypasses the need for CPU utilization, and the shared (USB) vs. unshared (Firewire) traffic bandwidth.

If you don't have a PC with a Firewire port, get a Firewire add-on of some kind (PCI card, PCI-e card, etc). Preferrably one with a TI chipset (less problems connecting).

Scott

[dun4cheap]

The data tranafer speed for firewire would not effect the quality of the transfer. The data is digital only, like a file transfer. So there would be no degridation with the usb2-firewire port transfer.

[usually_quiet]

I don't think EspressCard slots are common on new laptops. It may be necessary to look for an older model.

[edDV]

I don't think EspressCard slots are common on new laptops. It may be necessary to look for an older model.

They are often present on mid to upper range models but not on budget models.

[edDV]

The data tranafer speed for firewire would not effect the quality of the transfer. The data is digital only, like a file transfer. So there would be no degridation with the usb2-firewire port transfer.

"USB2-firewire" was never included in DirectShow directly. It requires a proprietary set of drivers for DV stream transfer and DV camcorder transport control that would work over USB. The only company to do this to my knowledge was Panasonic for a narrow range of MiniDV camcorders and none of these supported extenal analog capture.

Can such a proprietary capture device be made? Sure the DirectShow working group demonstrated this back around 2004. Has anyone made a usb DV capture device? Not that anyone has heard of.


PS: This is not to be confused with "USB DV file copy" which is supported by several PRO DV camcorders that have an internal OS that records DV to files on a hard disk or flash cards such as PII from Panasonic. These Pro camcorders support USB access to the PII card or hard drive for file copy under Windows. Windows sees these drives as network drives.

Consumer DV camcorders don't store DV to files but as data streams on tape controlled by time code. The DirectShow DV machine control module cues and plays the stream to Firewire. A DV capture program receives the stream and saves it to a DV-AVI file on disk.

[usually_quiet]

I don't think EspressCard slots are common on new laptops. It may be necessary to look for an older model.

They are often present on mid to upper range models but not on budget models.

When was the last time you looked? I examined several models priced at $1400 and above at newegg before making my post, and the feature wasn't listed in the specs. Searching for it also yielded no results.

[Cornucopia]

The data tranafer speed for firewire would not effect the quality of the transfer. The data is digital only, like a file transfer. So there would be no degridation with the usb2-firewire port transfer.

Totally and Particularly WRONG in this respect. DV data exports as a REALTIME STREAM, not like standard block-based files. This is like a broadcast signal - once you miss it, it's gone for good. This makes the TIMING of particular importance, and why usb is a very BAD choice.

Scott

[edDV]

I don't think EspressCard slots are common on new laptops. It may be necessary to look for an older model.

They are often present on mid to upper range models but not on budget models.

When was the last time you looked? I examined several models priced at $1400 and above at newegg before making my post, and the feature wasn't listed in the specs. Searching for it also yielded no results.

I guess it hasn't been recently enough.

[usually_quiet]

I don't think EspressCard slots are common on new laptops. It may be necessary to look for an older model.

They are often present on mid to upper range models but not on budget models.

When was the last time you looked? I examined several models priced at $1400 and above at newegg before making my post, and the feature wasn't listed in the specs. Searching for it also yielded no results.

I guess it hasn't been recently enough.

Kind of sad to see them go, but it looks like people want other things more, like thinner designs, USB 3.0, built-in card readers, and enhanced security.

[Edit]I continued looking and found Dell is still making some laptops with ExpressCard. This is one of them: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834200432

[VideoTechMan]

Yeah the expresscard slot has been phased out sometime ago. Didn't really catch on very well so no surprise that it had a short timespan.