Hello All,

I must say that we are glad to have found such a great forum that offers such great advice and information. Thanks to all!

My question concerns capturing video from the XL2 to the harddrive of my computer using scenalyzer or any software for that matter (I assume).

I am wondering about moving the MiniDV tape into the PC world.

Looking at several softwares it seems like I must watch the entire video to get it into the PC.

Is this the norm?

I am a total newb on video. I thought that since the video was digital that I could simply move a file from the tape to the PC.

I would figure there would be some sort of high speed transfer possible?

From my investigations this is not the case and a capture is required.

Scenalyzer says that a 5 minute index can be created of the tape as it is captured in Fast forward mode. This of course is just for the index and the actual tape is captured in real time.

Any and all clarification is much obliged.

Thanks and sorry if this question is too basic and my understanding should be more!

FM3

I am a big fan of scenalyzer. most of the time I just walk away while it is capturing to the hard drive. Unfortunately there is no way to speed it up. Definitely the most time constraining part of video editing

Watching the whole tape is a good idea? It helps you decide what scenes you really want to capture and helps with the story line. Sceneanylszer is very good, especially its scene detect for batch capture

Yep.. I use scenalyzer as well and I have to capture in Realtime.


big, big pain!

Thanks gentlemen.... yall have let me know at least how the game is played and something that I must deal with...

So I spent a hour to capture the miniDV. I ended up with a 13GB AVI file on my harddrive. The quality is very good, but good lord 13GB?

Looking through the options, the capture tab has a limit on the size of the avi file.

Can I ask what yall recommend and how yall set yalls capture options on scenalyzer.

I am learning Premier at the same time as this and it does read into the software nicely, but at 13 GB is this the norm?

Thanks for all help again!

FM3

video is an extreme hog when it comes to storage and resources. be prepared to purchase Hard drives at regular intervals. My wife wants to know why I have all these " boxes" laying around the computer. Video is not a cheap hobby.

As a general rule for every 4 minutes 1 gig of hard drive space will be used

Felix,
Was your filme one hour long with no stop in the recording of it? If not you can use scene detect. This is a feature that I use often and it captures each scene individually. A scene is when the time code changes.

As everyone has found out you cannot capture faster than real-
time with DV, unless you go with a harddisk based recording
system in which case you can just copy the files of the harddisk
as fast as it allows.

One hour of DV is indeed 13 GB, or around 3.6 MB/per second.
I would not call that taxing in this day and age. 100+ GB harddisk
are quite cheap these days and such a 100 GB drive can store
7.5 hours of DV footage.

Hello All,

Thanks for yalls response. To answer a previous question...

The video is indeed a total video an hour long. The video does span 2 MiniDV's total.

Some important points that I am glad for this community about is finding out that a miniDV is indeed 13GB and that there is not a fast way to capture video unless using a direct laptop setup.

I do have a great desktop computer with a large 200gb HD so this 13GB size is not a problem YET!

Also my laptop will come into play in direct capture. I am glad to find this out as I have a laptop that is aching to be used just for this.

Thanks all again,

Felix

Felix,
Unless there are real time constraints, think about whether you really want to do real time to your lap top!!


I shake thinking about the potential problems of frame drops, power loss....

Whether or not using a laptop could pose a problem depends on a couple of things:

1. how realiable it needs to be. With fictional work you can do another take if it dropped frames for example, with a wedding or other real-time event this is a problem of course

2. how portable the rig needs to be. Usually for fictional work you have more time and places to put a laptop than run and gun work as news or weddings.

Keep in mind that using a laptop or a full blown direct-to-disk recorder you
can always ALSO record to tape, creating an instant backup.