HDV Firewire capture to Mac?

[Robert Jackson]

I'm interested in trying out various setups and I was kind of hoping to capture live to my Mac so I could immediately work with the results. Does anyone know of a capture utility that will work? I tried BTV Pro and it doesn't recognize the camera. I guess it only works with DV streams over Firewire.

[Tim Dashwood]

Hi Robert.

FCP5 will capture live if you are using 720P30 mode. I've tried it and it works. In the other modes (720P24 and 720P25) HDVxDV works fine capturing "live." Unfortunately, there is no live on screen preview.

iMovie HD, DVHSCap and Lumiere HD won't work because they all automatically start the camera playing when you hit the "capture" button.

Ideally, it would be great to have an app on Mac OSX that will automatically start recording an m2t stream everytime the REC button is hit on the camera.

This way you could essentially use a mac mini/imac or ibook/powerbook/macbook in place of a Firestore.

A mac version of DVRack would be awesome, but Serious Magic says that they make "extensive use of Microsoft’s DirectShow technology" and therefore a Mac port is highly unlikely.

Do we have any mac programmers out there who want to help me create a MAc OSX "live" recorder? Email me.

[Robert Jackson]

Originally Posted by Tim Dashwood

Hi Robert.

FCP5 will capture live if you are using 720P30 mode. I've tried it and it works. In the other modes (720P24 and 720P25) HDVxDV works fine capturing "live." Unfortunately, there is no live on screen preview.

iMovie HD, DVHSCap and Lumiere HD won't work because they all automatically start the camera playing when you hit the "capture" button.

Ideally, it would be great to have an app on Mac OSX that will automatically start recording an m2t stream everytime the REC button is hit on the camera.

This way you could essentially use a mac mini/imac or ibook/powerbook/macbook in place of a Firestore.

A mac version of DVRack would be awesome, but Serious Magic says that they make "extensive use of Microsoft’s DirectShow technology" and therefore a Mac port is highly unlikely.

Do we have any mac programmers out there who want to help me create a MAc OSX "live" recorder? Email me.

Thank you very much. This information should really be right up at the front of the forum somewhere. Very helpful.