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  1. I have read hundreds of posts on the subject... many 5-10 years old. I have a bunch of DV and HDV tapes I am going to transfer to PC via 1394 on a Windows 10 system . I want to split into clips. I have looked at Scenalyzer and I like everything about it... but I also have Vegas 12 Platinum and intend to upgrade to 14 Platinum when released next month. I can't find any info on updated to VidCap and internal HDV capture ability of latest Vegas. So, does VidCap (in Vegas 14) support producing timecode based avi clips, and would it be a better bet than a 10 year old Scenalyzer? I also like the ability of Scenalyzer to produce an HTML file with thumbnails and details of all clips on a tape. This is nice to have in an archive disk. I don't see anything about Vegas that can do that... is there another utility that can just scan a folder of AVIs and produce a similar summary file?

    My other concern, is... I realize teh data read form tape and saved in avi container woudl be the same no matter what software I use,a s long as there are no dropped frame.. but, is there any issue with the avi container Scenalyzer produces as compared to current version of VidCap? Any updates to the format over the last 10 years that I would not have if using Scenalyzer.

    Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
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  2. This is strange. My HDV camcorder captures to an mpeg container, not AVI. And capture is an unfortunate word because there is no A/D conversion. I mean, I guess you can stick anything you want in an AVI container, but why? You do realize that DV/HDV is already encoded as digital h.262 8-bit 4:2:0 on the tape, right? I am afraid you are confusing "5-10 years old" analog VHS/Hi8 capture threads with DV/HDV which are already digital. Nothing stands between my HDV camcorder and the PC, other than the F/W cable. The only similarity is that you have to play the tape back to stream all those 1s and 0s to the PC. But that is where the similarities end. It is a perfect, lossless digital to digital capture. If you are experiencing dropped frames then that means your tape is probably corrupted, and the digital data is gone, a different problem than dropped frames in analog capture.
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  3. There's nothing new in the AVI container since the ODML extensions were added 20 years ago.
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  4. Thanks for the replies... I do understand that this is not a re-encoding... and just a transfer. I have not tried one yet, but I thought I read in a few areas that VidCap put the DV into an AVI wrapper on Windows machines... may be that is wrong. I will try some in few days.

    Is there anyone using Scenalyzer under Windows 10? I could not find a single thread on anyone doing that. If that will work, I think that is my best way to go, since it does everything I need... I just did not know if VidCap had any advantages in it's latest version with Vegas 14.. or if it has not changed at all in the last 10 years with features and still falls way short of Scenalyzer.
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  5. What are you afraid of? Just plug your camera into your computer and start capturing. If you run into problems, post back, but I don't think you will. I have never used VidCod or Scenalyzer. I may be wrong, but nobody is going to hold your hand and walk you through such a simple process. What tool you use is of no concern to me. If you were capturing analog footage then the process would involve a little more finesse. But this is DV and HDV for crying out loud. Don't over think it. Just capture it. Once you have done that then, maybe, there might be something worth discussing in this thread. It is a lot more productive to talk about the actual than the theoretical.
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  6. Thanks. Not looking for hand holding. Just looking to make sure there are no gotchas before I transfer 100 tapes. Looking to learn from others experience... and share mine when done. The whole purpose of these forums.
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  7. Capturing from DV camcorder use Scenalyzer Live thru firewire into AVI, I guess best software ever that was developed for this, now it is free, you can use that software even to browse archiving and look for clips, the way the GUI is,
    for capturing HDV I was using HDVSplit thru firewire into video with M2T extension, which is MPG file ...
    used to use Vegas to edit those clips as well, but Vegas capture cannot name clips by date , time-stamp, it only numbers them, which is quite confusing later on working with it if capturing into clips. If capturing by clips I practice this pattern:
    TAPE23 17-01-26_12-19.02
    starting with tape number, year,month, day, timestamp so it lines up by the time , always. Those two applications are very good and free. Capturing by clips makes it easier for editing video and also easily finding parts in video, or browsing clips on hardisk (as I said using Scenalyzer for that makes sense).

    If you are planning on simply loading capture into Vegas and then just editing out only couple of parts, or here and there, then just capture tapes as one long video, not capturing as clips.
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