DV Capture

[Greyhair]

I'm a newbie at camcorders. I'm purchasing a Canon GL1 with s-video out. I'm experienced at video capture from TV and ripping dvd's. How do you capture from digital video cam? I keep reading about firewire cards, do they capture direct DV files, or do you capture the video playback through Virtual Dub/AVI_IO?

TIA

[Tommyknocker]

http://www.vcdhelp.com/capture.htm#fire

[Greyhair]

Yeah, I've already read the guides. But it doesn't answer my question. And I'm so inexperienced at this, maybe it seems obvious to you but I've never done it.

1. When you capture with firewire, what file format do you have? Is it DV file?

2. Is it customary to capture analog, or is there too much loss via Virtual Dub/AVI_IO, or is there too much loss doing it this way?

[YngwieJM]

1. It's an .avi file that uses DV compression. 1 hour of DV yields a 13 gb file whereas capturing using v-dub at 720x480 uncompressed would be 60+ gb. The quality should be better using the firewire card as it is more like a file transfer than a video capture.

2. Too much loss and more of a pain in general.

[Greyhair]

Thanks.

I was just looking at firewire cards/dv cards. I noticed that my card, Visiontek Xtasy Everything is listed as a dv capture card. Does this mean that my card supports direct dv capture like a firewire? Will I still need to get a firewire card?

[YngwieJM]

I used to have an Xtasy Ev. and mine didn't have a firewire port. If it doesn't have a connector that looks kinda similar to a USB connector then it doesn't have firewire and you would have to get a firewire card. These are pretty cheap ($20-$50 depending on rebates, sales, etc.). I don't think any card is really much better than any other but I may be wrong.

[Greyhair]

No, the card doesn't have a firewire port. But then the camera has an s-video out? Xtasy does have s-video in.

If I capture through the s-video to the xtasy, am I capturing an analog signal or the dv files. If it's the raw dv files but the speed is slower on an s-video vs. firewire, I can live with that (at least for now). I just want to have the highest quality capture.

[YngwieJM]

Firewire is better than s-video capture in every way. I have done both with the same video and there's no comparison. Some people have a DV cam capable of "digital pass through" that allows them to hook up a VCR, analog video cam, etc. to the inputs of their DV camera and capture their analog footage to their computer using the compression of the DV codec! My camera was pretty cheap and didn't include this feature but if I were to do it again I would love to be able to capture "through" my DV cam to the computer and retain the quality of the original footage and have much smaller file sizes than raw .avi. Just to clear things up: capturing with firewire is done in real time just like analog capture. (1 hour of video takes 1 hour to capture no matter which way you capture). Most firewire cards come with editting software that can be used for capture. Once the footage is capped you can use any software to edit, compress, add transitions, etc. I use Vegas Video 3 to capture my DV .avi files and compress in TMPGEnc and burn to DVD-R.

[paul8883]

First you need to check if your camcoder has dv out (I think most if not all camcoder should have dv out). If yes, you may buy a firewire card so you can capture the mini dv to pc directly via firewire (it's clone, so no quality lost at all if your hardisk is fast enough without drop frame during the capturing). The type of dv avi file can be different depends on what capture program you are using, can be either dv type 1 avi (like ulead video studio/media studio, ...) or dv type 2 avi (like premier, avio, ...). the type 1 is smaller than type 2. But most tradditional video editing program accept only type 2 avi like vdub, premier, ...

[Greyhair]

So, based on what's been posted and some other reading I've done, the firewire output is a dv data file and a perfect transfer from the camcorder to your hdd. I'm assuming the s-video output is analog and a typical .avi file, and will be lossy.

If that's so, then firewire is it. I have one on order!

Thanks