Firewire Question

Hi.. I'm def a newbie. I just bought a Panasonic PV-GS65 Camera. I have a PC with Win XP SP1. I've read the basics here, and tried to understand them...

The manual is vague on how to download video to the PC. I understand the cam has a Firewire output to send Digital Vid to the PC

If my PC already has a Firewire input on the Motherboard, do I also need to buy a Video Capture card?

Many thanks!
Chris P.

miniDv capture video as a hugh digital file on tape, you don't need a video capture card.

Firewire is not a video transport, it send data from minDV like a huge file.

The freeware to transfer minDV avi file is winDV ( on the tool section on this site ).

Many thanks for the info.! I appreciate it.

Ok.. so if I understand right, I download the MiniDV tape to my PC and now I have a huge .AVI file.

Now I want to edit it.. (and eventually burn a DVD (NTSC format). I would like a simple-to-use editing program.. I've been reading here about the Windows Movie-Maker 2 program.. but I'm not clear if it will burn a final DVD.

Any comments on this prog, or any suggestions what else I should try..?

Chris P.

I use VirtualDub Mod for editing. It works as well as the payware editors for DV. It also has many filters available if they are needed. You need to add the Panasonic DV codec. Then you can read and output the edited DV. Or you can frameserve the edited DV directly to a MPEG-2 encoder like TMPGEnc encoder to encode to DVD compliant MPEG-2 video. This eliminates having to save the edited file, along with the hard drive space it would occupy. (DV takes about 13.5 GB of hard drive space per hour of video.) Then all you need to do is author and burn it to DVD. I use TMPEGnc DVD Author for the authoring.

If you want quick and easy, ConvertXToDVD will convert the DV directly to DVD format, though at lesser quality than the above method. There is a freeware version of it also in 'Tools' about 1/2 way down the page I linked to.

Thanks Redwudz and edDV....! but whoa.. as a newbie I'm a bit overwhelmed by lotsa new terms... this is going to be a steep learning curve, I can see..

I guess I'll go and read the Glossary...

Redwudz, I'm a bit confused as to the "order of processes" you suggest now. Is this right..?

1. Download the DV from the cam to PC with winDV via Firewire
2. Edit the .AVI file with VirtualDubMod
(Where does the Panasonic DV Codec come in here..?)
3. Send the edited file from VirtualDubMod to TMPGEnc to make the DVD
4. Burn the DVD with TMPGEnc DVD Author.

?

Thanks for your patience... (this seems complicated!)

ChrisP

Originally Posted by chrisparry1

2. Edit the .AVI file with VirtualDubMod
(Where does the Panasonic DV Codec come in here..?)
3. Send the edited file from VirtualDubMod

You can skip these steps, and do it with DVDauthor. They are very time consuming and yield no real benefit.

Try :
1. Transfer the miniDV AVI file with firewire and windv.
2. Encode it to DVD mpeg2 with TMPGenc.
3. Load and author the mpeg2 into the tracks and chapters in TMPGenc DVDauthor.
4. Export DVD project and burn.

Does it in TMPGenc DVDauthor as title and chapter. Instant review and very very quick.

Err, so how do you cut out the bits you don't want? Add effects? Transitions?

In TDA, for the segment you don't want, add the video twice. On the first one, stop at where the start of deletion point, on the second one, start at the place you want to pick back up.

TDA can't do transitions.

Originally Posted by SingSing

In TDA, for the segment you don't want, add the video twice. On the first one, stop at where the start of deletion point, on the second one, start at the place you want to pick back up.

TDA can't do transitions.

So you don't do any editing then?