newbie question about minidv cams

[fcaeiro]

Hi
I'm thing to buy a minidvd cam that have usb and firewire connector.

i have some questions :

1º how do i transfer the movie to my pc ?

1a
do i have to grab the movie like play on on the cam and grab the output (like i did with my old hi8cam) ?

1b
Can i see the movie on tape like a file and copy it to my harddisk ?

If i have one hour movie on minidv do i have to wait one our to transfer it to my pc ??
In what format thoes the movie file will be on my pc avi ? mpg ?

thank in advance .

[Mac Sidewinder]

Well if you buy a firewire card package, it will come with some software especially for transferring your movie from the camera to the computer. If you buy a basic card it may not. Some of the programs used to transfer are: Pinnacle Studio, Sonic Foundry Video Vegas.

When you transfer from the camera to computer, it is done in real time. So if you are transferring an 1 hour movie, then it will take 1 hour to get it on the hard drive. Since it is digital, there will be no loss of quality. It will be saved in an uncompressed avi format. Which will be huge. 1 hour will typically take up 13gb of hard drive space.

Once you have this, you can manipulate it with various programs to get the output format you desire, (divx, vcd, svcd, dvd, etc).

Mac

[bira]

You can use Scenalyzer (http://www.scenalyzer.com) to transfer your avi's to the computer.

DV AVI is NOT uncompressed. That's why it takes "only" 13Gb per hour.

[Mac Sidewinder]

DV AVI is NOT uncompressed. That's why it takes "only" 13Gb per hour.

My bad, I realize that this is not uncompressed, I was simply trying to convey the fact that he will need a large hard drive to process dv if he is going to work with hour long videos.

Mac