Firewire video capture quickie

[andryn]

Uncharted territory this is, and armed with one MiniDV Camcorder with one firewire out socket.

Cant I just buy a firewire card put it in my base unit and 'upload' the video to hard drive without using all the software? Ready to edit later.

And have I got to have a video graphics card as well?

I have tried the analogue way round without success - drops too many frames.

[Boone]

I believe you need software to actually do the capturing (at least that's the way I've always done it). Also, it's very much a streaming operation (think CD writing in the days before buffer underrun protection), so if you've got a slower or *busy* computer, it'll drop frames too.

Your Video graphics card will drive your monitor, so you need one of those, but you don't need an mpeg encoding card, if that's what you mean.

[MikeTR]

Don't panic, it's quite easy once you get into it .

First, visit http://www.doom9.org and http://www.vcdhelp.com for guides and tools.

You can copy your feed 1-on-1 using firewire. No quality loss at all. There are several free tools on vcdhelp.com that you can use (look in the extended Tools section). No need for anything else.
The editing part is/can be more complicated. It depends on what you want to do. There is a lot of software available (including freeware). I'd suggest you browse the forums on the mentioned sites. I find them very informative.

Good luck.

[andryn]

Cheers Boone,

Out of curiosity, to everyone who uses a dv camcorder & firewire...
What is your computer spec? The whole lot that makes Video Editing work for you.
Hardware, chips, software, cards, makes, models, speeds, drives, etc.
Maybe I can start from scratch with your help.

Thanks

[Boone]

P4 2.8c, i875 chipset, 768 MB RAM, ATA/133 HD, WinDVD Creator 2.0 software, Firewire card with TI chipset, and a Panasonic DV-103 MiniDV camcorder.

[burninfool]

All you need is a $30 firewire card and authoring software,some firewire cards come with authoring software.As was said earlier go to www.dvdrhelp.com and visit their Tools section,lots of freeware.
Encoding is CPU intensive so buy the fastest one you can afford,a large amount of RAM(>512MB) isn't that critical but it helps when editing.

[TheWizard]

The easiest video editing software I have used is Windows Movie Maker. I can create a 22 minute movie in just under 10 minutes on my P4 1.7GHz, 512MB RAM, ATA/100 puter.

[Turkeyscore.com]

1 GHZ Athlon, 2 120 gb hard drives 8mb cache, 512 ram, $20 Firewire Card, Panasonic PV-DV203D, XP Home, Windows Movie Maker 2.0
Firewire Card with Cable: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... =73&depa=1 (AT least I think that this one comes with a 4pin/6pin 6 foot cable.)