DVCAM Capture Problems

[mdominic]

UPDATE: I went back to the DSR-1500 from the PD-150 and was able to bring tapes in ONLY in QT. The recording does stop on a bad or dropped frame, but maybe once or twice per tape. Not a big deal. FCP and iMovie both still chop it up. Premiere doesn’t see the deck.

I am having an impossible time getting DVCAM onto my mac. I have tried two DVCAM decks, three macs, three different capture software, plus several different cables and adapters. The result is always the same, the video drops out for several seconds while it is playing perfectly on the deck.

I made a video so you can see the issue...

https://youtu.be/yQ4mIunDf1I

[dellsam34]

How can we help you without knowing what hardware and software you're using what worklow being used? It's like going to the mechanic and saying my car doesn't work.

[mdominic]

How can we help you without knowing what hardware and software you're using what worklow being used? It's like going to the mechanic and saying my car doesn't work.

Three different Macs. M1 Macbook Pro, Intel, both running the latest OS, and another MacBook that is 11 years old I have no idea what the hardware/OS is. I used a DSR-1500A and a PD-150 as decks. I tried Firewire 400 and 800 cables with adapters to Thunderbolt and USB-C.

[mdominic]

UPDATE: I went back to the DSR-1500 from the PD-150 and was able to bring tapes in ONLY in QT. The recording does stop on a bad or dropped frame, but maybe once or twice per tape. Not a big deal. FCP and iMovie both still chop it up. Premiere doesn’t see the deck.

[dellsam34]

Sorry I cannot help you with MAC, never used it, never a big fan of it, and usually it is not the best OS for this type of projects, Buy a cheap used PC get your project done and sell it.

[jwillis84]

there are two ways of capturing DV video on a Mac

The preferred (best) way is usually to connect the DV Camcorder to a firewire port on an old Mac, newer Macs do not have a firewire port, so you could use a Thunderbolt to firewire adapter

But if the DV Camcorder or playback device has a problem in its firewire circuit it may still playback well on a regular TV or video device as an analog signal, over composite or s-video

In that case a USB Vidbox brand capture device may work on Mac OSX up to 10.6.8 or up to 10.13 but nothing later than that can be trusted.. macOS security quickly disabled many analog video capture devices when it was released and most M1 Macs cannot run the legacy drivers or software

A third option is a standalone video capture device which records the analog to h.264 files on an SD card or flash thumb drive, Avermedia makes several

A fourth option (but much more expensive) option is to use something like a Black Magic Express or Shuttle to bring in signal over USB or Thunderbolt

And a fifth option is to find a service provider than can perform the transfer for you and uploaded the results as files online that you can then download to your Mac

If you can find or borrow a different DV player to playback your tapes, you may find you can use that with whatever firewire Mac you already have