Hi everyone.

I' currently working as a freelance videographer, and one of my main jobs is to attend castings to record actors while they are trying out for their role.

I used to work with a Canon GL2 (SD) that streamed via FireWire to my Lenovo SL500 laptop equipped with Windows 7 and working with uLead DVD MovieFactory.

This program was awesome because it did exactly what I wanted : record, simple in/out edit and simple and quick DVD authoring.

However, now that I've switched to HDV (XH A1), the process is kinda harder : it takes almost 6 hours to render an hour of content to burn on a DVD.

Anyone has solution for me? Hints and tips?

Thanks!

EDIT : It's pretty strange, when I try to stream DV content (4:3/16:9), it records for 11 seconds the stops, saying the file is corrupted.

Uhmm?

Etienne - Is your final output a HD DVD? For one, you could record in SD even on the A1 it still is very nice, or you could record to tape (do you need to do that?) in HD and downconvert in the camera to SD. You could even still record 16x9 but just do it in SD ...

if your laptop is working too hard to do the downconversion to SD when it's encoding, you may be forcing it to do a lot of work if your output is SD and your source was HD if you don't need the HD ... I've recorded many events in HDV on the A1 and authored the final project in SD and it looks good even on a large TV for playout ...

is this any help?

Well, thanks for replying.

As I said, I don't know why, but I can't record in SD on my laptop, it says "file corrupted" every time.

So I'm pretty stuck with HD..

Etienne - well, if your output is SD and you are capturing in HD, your PC is going to have to resize the video to SD and that will take some CPU. If you need to capture directly to the laptop so that you can skip the capture step, then you probably need to look into what is causing the error (most likely the file isn't corrupted IMO).

One alternative would be to record to tape then capture from tape, if you have the time. You could tape in HD so that if you needed to capture in HD you would still have HD, but you could also tell your A1 to send SD when you capture and you can take a few tries to fix your error since you have the material on tape. If you can get the video into your laptop in SD you are saving a lot of work if your editing is only simple cuts.

One suggestion would be to download a demo / eval copy of a different editing package to see if that is able to capture your video any better (say pinnacle studio for example). If you can capture HDV, your laptop should be able to keep up with capturing SD, so the problem isn't likely that your hard drive is too slow. You may also want to look in the ulead forums or contact them for support.

good luck!

Alright.

Well, I can't see myself using another program than DVD MovieFactory 6, it does exactly what I need.

With ONE program I can : capture, encode, edit then output with the ideal menu setting so the clients know exactly what to look at (it's a difficult business).

Capturing to tape would imply lot's of work when I get home : transfer from tape to the computer, do my editing, etc.

This program is perfect because I can start my editing when I have some downtime, even at the lunch break.

Is there any other program where I could do the same thing?

Anyone familiar with a DVD recorder?

Is there a way to record to the hard drive of the DVD recorder, then I do a simple editing and it would take no time to encore and burn??

Etienne - you could also go that route... if you're using a DVD recorder, you'd record your event onto a DVD (most likely), rip that DVD into a laptop, do some basic editing on the mpeg file, and then author and burn your disk. however if you really just want the encoded video, you could also use a hardware encoder to encode the video stream to your laptop and then do your simple editing on that file (skipping the step to rip the burned dvd). however this seems to be a complex workaround for importing the encoded video directly from your camera. also try to download a demo copy of pinnacle studio, also an entry editor which also does all of those functions. you may or may not see the same capture issues, depends on what's wrong. good luck!