Of course there's a HDV Rack. But it's too costly, and its design after the physical devices, down to little knobs and handles, does not excite me while I can't even fit a HDV monitor and Waveform side-by-side on 1024x768 display. Plus, its HDV monitor window is way too small and cannot be expanded (zoom in is not enough).

HDV Split (I think current version is 0.7) is a great free utility to capture and MONITOR hdv signal in real time, full resolution. Works great, but it doesn't have a waveform monitor. (THe software clearly was designed to split HDV files on timecode breaks, but I use it for its capture capabilities.)

Is there anything like HDV Split, but with waveform monitor?

You can monitor the picture with HDV Split ? I have not seen this.

Giroud, yes - I think since version 0.52.

You can choose from 1/4 to Full resolution.

Since I have a 2-monitor setup on my editing PC, I usually set the full-res caption monitor to diplay on right monitor, while the user's interface of HDV Split is on the left one.

Works great!

If you figre out how to contact the software's author, please let me know...

Sorry I don’t have a recommendation for you. I use HDV Rack and love it. You are forgetting the fact that HDV Rack is a calibrateable field monitor. You will NOT be getting this kind of color and luma accuracy simply by capturing with a program that shows a preview window that you can’t trust. Did you know you can make the HDV monitor full screen with Alt+Enter (of course you can’t see the waveform monitor at that point but you do get a nice big preview). ;-) You can easily toggle between this and the view with the waveform monitor.

Just any ole’ capture solution will also not give you the audio monitoring that HDV Rack has so you can see if you are clipping or popping, etc. I’m not sure if HDV Split will turn on and off with your camera record button like HDV Rack does either. There are a lot of capabilities to consider here for ease of recording and monitoring.

If your laptop is 1024x768 (4:3) and you are shooting HDV (16:9) perhaps it’s time to invest in a widescreen laptop with a 1280x800 display. I know that doesn’t solve your problem today but something to consider in the future. A 1280x800 LCD laptop with HDV Rack really rocks!

~jr