Simple capture on Mac???

Bill Davis · July 4th, 2008, 04:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jim Andrada

I've captured a few short clips with Quicktime/MacOS and edited with Vegas/XP/VMware

Everything worked well.

Yesterday I tried it with a fairly long video and Quicktime stopped capturing after about 2 minutes with a message saying it had reached its maximum. I think it said max file size, but not 100% sure I'm remembering that part correctly. I was using the "Device Native" setting.

I couldn't find any way to increase the length of the capture. I may play around further with iMovie.

Anyhow, I broke down and loaded Final Cut Express on the system. I'm not particularly interested in learning a new NLE, but it seems to work fine for capture, and I can probably do most everything I need to with it while I'm on the road. Although at the moment I'm just capturing with it.

Jim,

I didn't realize you were looking for longer-form capture.

Another option (tho it will cost a couple of hundred bucks) is to consider Red Lightening Software's DV Monitor Pro (or HD Monitor Pro if you're working with High-def).

It's a full featured live-to-disc capture utility that turns your laptop into a full screen shooting monitor as well.

I've used it to capture hour long presenations and never had any issues with clip length.

My original suggestion was for a free or nearly free solution, and unfortunately, as you've discovered, free often comes with limitations.

Good luck.

Jim Andrada · July 5th, 2008, 01:32 AM

Well, I seem to have come full circle on this. Here's the latest status

I went back and read a bit of the (sparse to say the least!) documentation on iMovie. They suggested starting with about a 15 minute capture for tutorial purposes, so I concluded that there isn't any particular time limit on the captures.

I hooked up the camera and with iMovie captured about 5 minutes of SD video. I then went into XP and located the iMovie files in the folder that VMWare shares with MacOS and was able to directly drag and drop the clips recorded by iMovie onto the Vegas timeline successfully. No rendering or other conversion needed. Vegas was perfectly happy to open the QT files exactly as iMovie had recorded them. iMovie had correctly split the stream into separate clips for me.

Conclusion - capturing clips with the freebie iMovie under MacOS and editing them in Vegas under XP/VMWare works fine.

Next thing to try will be capturing to an external drive. The MacBook has two firewire ports, but one is 800 the other 400 and I don't have an 800 to mini firewire cable so this will have to wait a while. iMovie says that it will only capture to an external drive if it is Firewire. I think this will work OK, and if not, capturing to the internal 250GB drive isn't such a huge problem

By the way, I downloaded the DV Monitor Pro package and will also play with it over the next couple of days.

July 5th, 2008, 01:32 AM	#17
Jim Andrada Inner Circle Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: Tucson AZ Posts: 2,211	It all seems to work!!! Well, I seem to have come full circle on this. Here's the latest status I went back and read a bit of the (sparse to say the least!) documentation on iMovie. They suggested starting with about a 15 minute capture for tutorial purposes, so I concluded that there isn't any particular time limit on the captures. I hooked up the camera and with iMovie captured about 5 minutes of SD video. I then went into XP and located the iMovie files in the folder that VMWare shares with MacOS and was able to directly drag and drop the clips recorded by iMovie onto the Vegas timeline successfully. No rendering or other conversion needed. Vegas was perfectly happy to open the QT files exactly as iMovie had recorded them. iMovie had correctly split the stream into separate clips for me. Conclusion - capturing clips with the freebie iMovie under MacOS and editing them in Vegas under XP/VMWare works fine. Next thing to try will be capturing to an external drive. The MacBook has two firewire ports, but one is 800 the other 400 and I don't have an 800 to mini firewire cable so this will have to wait a while. iMovie says that it will only capture to an external drive if it is Firewire. I think this will work OK, and if not, capturing to the internal 250GB drive isn't such a huge problem By the way, I downloaded the DV Monitor Pro package and will also play with it over the next couple of days.