Tapeless HDV-A Winner?

[Karl Soule]

We do have customers doing it on a daily basis. DV Rack (with the HDV PowerPak) will capture in the .m2t file direct to any hard drive with a letter designation (C:, D:, E:, etc.)

In response to one of the comments above about the HDV portion causing "lockups," we can almost always trace this problem back to one thing - insufficient processor speed. HDV is extremely processor intensive, and in order to decode/play back the video, you need a processor with a clock speed of 2.0GHz or higher (maybe a little less for a dual-core.) A 1.6 GHz Pentium M is not going to be able to handle HDV playback/monitoring.

To see if you are running into this problem, fire up DV Rack, and then press CTRL-ALT-DEL. Go to the processor performance graph, and leave it running. Then, connect your HDV camera, and start recording. If the processor shoots up past 85%, you are running the risk of maxing out the CPU, which could cause it to lock up or crash.

In the field monitor menu, there are three settings that can help reduce the CPU load - make sure Visible Lines is set to Even, MPEG Resolution set to Half, and MPEG Frames is set to I Only. This will reduce the decoding to a minimum, and cut the CPU load down. If this works without maxing the processor, bump each of the values up in turn. I usually start with setting MPEG Frames up to I+P to get a better frame rate in the field monitor. Again, keep monitoring your processor load, and bump the values back down if you start reaching the danger level.

[Chris Forbes]

have u seen anyone running your software on a Mac with windows?? I would love to use your program but I'm not going to buy a Wintel box to do it.

[Karl Soule]

We have heard from over 10 customers running the "boot camp" option, and it does work. However, keep in mind that Apple Boot Camp is beta software. We have not done any testing of this configuration at this point.