I have a mini-DV camcorder, and I’d like to start transferring some video from cassettes to my hard drive.
(I’ve been told that a firewire cable does a better job moving video without dropping frames than does a USB cable - any opinions?)
I can’t afford to drop $800 or whatever for the Adobe product - is there a good freeware video capture app? I don’t need to do much, if any, editing - I’m just looking to preserve family film. I guess being able to insert meta-data would be nice.
I already have the Gimp for still image manipulation and I like it.
I use Virtual Edit to do my editing. The basic version is free, so you can fiddle with it without spending money, and still save the results.
If you don’t need to do any editing, it works fine for importing. With Firewire, you can control the camera from the capture screen. I’m saving video as I type!
It’s a bit clunky, you need to make sure you’ve set the correct capture format if you’re not using DV.
For format changing/resizing, there’s a far faster freeware called Virtualdub. You can also save DV via Firewire.
So I do my importing/editing with Virtual Edit, save, then open with Virtualdub to (for say Youtube) reduce the framerate, resize, and save as a Youtube friendly format (MPEG4, 640x480,15FPS).
Before doing a major project, do say a minutes worth right thru, noting all the settings and check the results to make sure the end results ok. (I ended up doing several uploads to Youtube before I was happy with the end result.)