I am fairly new at this...so please bear with a beginner's question. I was wondering what the best way to get my video from tape to my computer. Right now, I am just plugging a standard 4-pin to 6-pin firewire cable into my Canon XH A1 and my computer, then using my video editing platform's (premiere elements) video capture feature.

This process has worked well so far, but I don't want to sit there and wait for an hour of real-time footage to transfer. Is there any better way?

There is no faster way. Because of how the video is recorded on the tape you can not speed it up to get it transfered fast to the host computer. It is a minute for minute transfer.

Jeff

That's what I thought, thanks Jeff. I have had a little trouble with keeping the audio synched with the video...sometimes it lags about a minute behind. Is there any thing I can do to fix this?

Hi Jake,

You could be having problems on several different fronts. (I don't use Elements, as I have PPro 2.) One, it could be your firewire cable. Two, it could be your firewire capture card. Three, it could be Elements. And last, it could be your computer's (I'm assuming you have a PC, not a Mac) specs isn't fast enough.

I don't have the XHA1, but recently bought the HV30. Downloaded a trial copy of Cineform, which helped edit on my old Dell PC (3.4ghz HT, 2gig memory), but still had to capture several times to get it "right" (The captured AVIs had macroblocking, and looked like dropped frames, but the captured tapes looked clean). I know for sure it's because my PC is slooow.

Troubleshoot and see what turns up.

Best,

It could also be the hard drive you're capturing to that's slow.

Yikes! Thanks Bill, missed that one.

Now that I've re-read Jake's original post, he said capturing from his cam using firewire with Elements had worked before.

Could it be that the firewire cable had degraded? The files in his harddrive has slowed incoming capture footage? (In which case, the harddrive needs to be de-fragged? But still there's the issue of a "slow" drive.)

From experience, when editing SD files in a long form program (with PPro2), renders tend to last longer, keyboard shortcuts fail, and sometimes the NLE crashes! Double yikes!

Digits are digits. If the cable was soaked in water and starting to go rusty it would work fine up to the point it degraded the signal enough for the receiving unit to give up. The audio is in the same datastream as the video, so if the video is fine, any audio problems are within he computer, and the cable has no part to play in the quality process. Processor issues are the most likely cause of the problem - the video and audio is split and treated separately, as video is the most data intensive element, the programmes divert resources that way - so if something gets delayed it's usually video. I do a lot of audio for video stuff, and my multi-track PC sometimes delays the record stream by ten seconds when playing back too many tracks with too many effects! Shutting down and starting up sometimes puts things back.

Something else you can do (if you're not doing it already) is to can all and any other processes running in the background that soak up machine resources.

Assuming you're running either Win 98 or XP SP x, go to Start, Run, type in "MSCONFIG" (no quotes), OK, click on both the "Services" and "Startup" tabs and click on "Disable All" for both.

The machine will say it needs to re - boot, do so. When it come back it will throw up a message saying "you've messed with my vitals" yadda yadda, click "rack off" and proceed to your ingest and editing.

You now have no virus/ firewall (and a shed load of other useless stuff), so it's a good idea to disable your network connection beforehand.

If you find that there's something not running that your video editing absolutely requires, you will have to dive back into those tabs and selectively enable that/ those item (s).

It all sounds a bit scary but you can't break anything - if the wheels fall off for any reason just dive back into "msconfig" and re - enable everything again.

You'd be suprised what resources it can free up.


CS

Thanks for all the advice everyone. I'll try a couple of these suggestions and let you know what turns up.