Hello to all:

I have borrowed a friends Sony HVR-Z1U camera for a potential HD shoot. The client is overseas so I will need to convert the final tape files to h264 .mov and send them via FTP. The conversion part I can do with Mpeg Streamclip.

The capturing of the HDV files off the tape via the firewire connection is where I'm stuck. I do not do any HD editing and have no software for that purpose. Standard def DV is as far as I can go.

Are there any simple HDV capture utilities I can install on my Dell firewire laptop to get the files off these tapes for the conversion? I looked at something called ConnectHD but it wants a very fast system and seems to need to convert the files to it's own proprietary format.

HDV is only 35Mbit/s (as opposed to DV's 25Mbit/s) so I would think my 1.6Ghz laptop can do the capture
just fine if I can find a low-CPU capture utility.

Any suggestions?

There is a freeware program called HDV split that works really well for me. Version 0.77Beta was the last version.

Another program that will do it is VLC, but it's buried in the menus.

HDV split is just a quick and easy utility to capture HDV from tape. You can capture as one long file and split into scenes later, or have it separate the video into scenes automatically during capture.

Hope this helps.

Hi George,

I second the motion for HDV Split, but wanted to add that HDV uses the exact same data rate as DV...that is why the miniDV tapes holds the same 60 minutes of video whether DV or HDV.

Thanks

Thank you Roger.

I gave HDV Split a try and it did seem to capture some test clips even using my 1ghz machine. This Dell was too slow to offer a preview of the capturing but the files seem to be there.