capturing with a miniDV camcorder??

[midiguy]

I just thought of something.. if a miniDV camcorder has an analog in, and allows you to convert that analog signal to DV format on your miniDV tape, and then you just transfer the footage on the tape to a DV file on your computer, would that work well?? this way, if you want to capture something off of TV, you don't have to use messy lossless codecs or worry about dropped frames, etc. anyone ever tried this before?

[AudioVideoMaster]

YES

It works; I've done one time before.

[s_kound]

Yes it works....

I use my mini dv camera (sony dcr-pc101e) as pass-through to transfer through firewire my analogue old videos and then burn them to dvd-r.

You can also write all video signals to dv tape or transfer them through your dv camera (firewire) to your pc like you said with no loss of quality or dropped frames....

:D I'm really happy that some dv cameras can do this because i was very bored looking for Best analogue capture card without problems!

[anarco]

that only a few miniDV camcorder support in and out at the same time
but if it supports that it really works great
I already captured 2 vhs movies that way.

[SimonSez07]

this method is very convenient and relatively pain-free, but it is NOT LOSSLESS. dv as a compression format is lossy and in my experiences it is not impossible to have frames dropped transfering video over firewire onto your pc. it could be that my hdd could not keep up or something like that.

[evtilsley]

Originally posted by SimonSez07
this method is very convenient and relatively pain-free, but it is NOT LOSSLESS. dv as a compression format is lossy and in my experiences it is not impossible to have frames dropped transfering video over firewire onto your pc. it could be that my hdd could not keep up or something like that.

At DV's 4MBytes/sec rate, the loss isn't too bad though. You're right about dropped frames - make sure drive had plenty of space, defragmented, and fast! 9600 rpm in my PC seems fairly robust.

Ed

[bb]

Originally posted by evtilsley
At DV's 4MBytes/sec rate, the loss isn't too bad though. You're right about dropped frames - make sure drive had plenty of space, defragmented, and fast! 9600 rpm in my PC seems fairly robust.

Ed
Neither the transfer speed nor the HDD speed has any impact on drops, because even old HDDs can deal with the relatively slow 3.6 MB/s DV speed. There must be another problem like interrupt sharing, background tasks eating up CPU, no DMA mode selected or something else. You can safely use a 5400 rpm IDE drive on a well-configured system.

bb

[evtilsley]

Originally posted by bb
Neither the transfer speed nor the HDD speed has any impact on drops, because even old HDDs can deal with the relatively slow 3.6 MB/s DV speed. There must be another problem like interrupt sharing, background tasks eating up CPU, no DMA mode selected or something else. You can safely use a 5400 rpm IDE drive on a well-configured system.

bb

I've found on my aging Packard Bell, I will suffer drops if the drive is messy (when capturing for 5 mins +). Of course the host PC may not be configured optimally, so the uncluttered path to the drive helps the session I think.

Ed