Just for backup purpose(on the road) is it possible to capture HV20 tape not having FCP/ Premiere or any of the editing software available?

It's for a friend of mine which was requested to make some shot and does not have any editing software,he will only shoot and give the tape to an editor.

As a security purpose he will like to back up the work at the end of the day.


He's on a MAC book pro / Tiger / he was asked to shoot HDV(probably not 25f).

Is Imovie enough for this purpose?

Any suggestion?

iMovie does not capture in native HDV. It converts it to Apple Intermediate Codec.

DVHSCap works for my XH A1.

I don't know any tool for Mac, but HDVSplit does it on Windows. If you're interested, here's the link: http://strony.aster.pl/paviko/hdvsplit.htm

This is a free tool. It's light-weight and is easy to use. It also splits the scenes nicely for you, and saves them as separate files.

You can use Quicktime Pro to capture in "Device Native" quality.

Daniel gave the answer. For the Mac, DVHS Cap. A free utility in the developer toolkit, if you have trouble locating it, let us know.

I use this to pull ALL my footage off of my HV30 and XHA1, and this is what I will archive, and the clips I want to use, I will transcode them or import them to edit.

It is a very simple software that provides device control as well (Rewind, FF, Stop, Play, Capture, etc..)

This captures a raw .M2T file to your disk. At this point it is not transcoded into any specific codec, it's just the MPEG 2 Transport stream. Later on, you can use the freeware MPEG Streamclip or Quicktime Pro or whatever to encode the .M2T file into the codec of your choice or whatever your editing program requires. These files are also a good way to archive your raw footage, for archival or future usage.

The .M2T files themselves will be smaller file size than if they were encoded to a specific codec. So that's the best, easiest, fastest, cheapest way to do what you asked about.

Thank you very much.

I'll pass the information and i'll try myself