I borrowed a DV30 from a friend and shot some test video. I am totally new to this.

I tired to download to my Windows XP pro machines with no luck, but I was able to download to my new Vista machine.

It captured the video off the tape OK as a dvr-ms file, and I assumed it would be at full camera resolution, but when i looked at the properties of the file it says it's 720x480.

I don't understand how I get a full resolution file off the camera.

Any advise appreciated.

Kerry

A question and a couple of thoughts.

First, what did you use to capture? You don't want it as a .dvr-ms file. You want .mpeg or .m2t (I think is the extension). Download HDVSplit and try capturing with that. It's free and dead reliable. It will only capture HDV video, not DV (as far as I know).

Not sure if .dvr-ms format supports HD plus you could run into digital rights issues.

It also sounds like the camera is set to down convert the footage to DV in the camera and sending SD to the computer. Check in the menus for output settings and make sure that it's set to output HDV.

I hate to be so lame at this, but... I bought the HV30 camera, and I installed the HDV Split application and it seemed to download my files from the camera.

However I have Vista SP1 and it does not know how to read m2t files. The HDV Split had a link to a m2t decoder, but it was last released in 2004 and called an alpha version. It doesn't seem like the right app for Vista.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Windows Movie Maker for Vista does not work with these files.

Thanks

Kerry

Kerry, maybe you could try these methods:

You can download to your computer two ways via a firewire cable:

1: As a HDV file (.m2t), using HDV Split (free - Paviko's website (http://strony.aster.pl/paviko/)), or:

2: As a DV (.avi) file, using WinDV (free - WinDV (http://windv.mourek.cz)), or other capture program.
To save as an .avi file (720x480), set the DV Lock in place in the 'play' menu on your camera.
You can see this setting if your firewire cable is NOT plugged in.

So, now you have your choice of file types on your computer, so what to do with them?

If you've used HDV Split, you want to download MPEG_Streamclip(free - Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows (http://www.squared5.com)).
Follow the instructions with reference to the proper version of Quicktime. This will allow you to render
your file to one of several choices.

If you are capturing as an .avi, you could use VirtualDub (both to capture and edit with).
It's also free and can be found here: Welcome to virtualdub.org! - virtualdub.org (http://www.virtualdub.org/).

From there, you decide what you want to do with the rendered files.