Hello, I got a Camcorder for christmas, and was wondering what the best way to get the footage onto my pc was.
I have used a Sony Camcorder in the past, which is simple to transfer, just use the i.link port and a firewire card, and it goes straight on.
The camcorder I got does not have an i.link port however, it is the Canon V75HI (Shown Here) .
I was thinking maybe I could buy a tv card, and then use the tv out?
Any ideas from any amateur movie-maker dopers?
Thanks,
Alexei
ATI All-In-Wonder will do what you want simply and spectacularly. Its a tv tuner card with composite, cable and s-video inputs. S-video and composite outputs.
No, I don’t work for them, but I’ve used this product extensively and I love it.
This is an 8mm camcorder, not a digital, so there won’t be any digital output. Yes, the best thing for you to do is to use the composite audio/video outputs and run it to your PC through a video capture card.
Thanks for the quick replies guys, I’ll head down to the computer store when I can and pick up one of those cards.
Tell me, what’s the quality like - do they drop frames at all?
Oh, and what kind of price we talking 'bout here? A quick revealed tv cards at around £40.
The cards generally do a fine job. It’s the format you record into that makes the biggest difference. AVI is a lossless compression method, so you retain your image sharpness; however, the filesize will be much larger than that with the lossy MPEG-2 compression. I’ve not done a great deal of digital video, so that’s about all I can offer.
It may drop frames; depends on your computer. Anything over 600Hz should work fine.
As Q.E.D. mentioned quality depends on format. AVI is indeed lossless and you can set the capture resolution. However, expect your files to be enormous. You can either caputure the video raw (ie, AVI) and convert it at the end or capture it directly into a compressed format (expect frame dropping on a slow machine if you do this).
As for the final format of your videos, I don’t know what to recommend. I’ve done pretty extensive video capture work and that’s one thing I never really worked out. You’ll just have to play around with different compressions (MPEG-2, etc.) to find what works best for you. Quite frankly, I love WMV format.
oh, If you’re editing though, you’ll need them raw.
Just to throw in another idea. If you have a friend with a decent DV camcorder, most have “pass through” dubbing capability. There is an analog in connection on the DV camera (or it’s docking base) than you can hook the 8mm camera outputs to. This automatically converts the analog in to a high quality DV signal. In many cases, by not putting a tape in the DV cam you can daisy chain the DV to the Firewire (i-link) computer input and directly get an AVI. Many users seem to think this gives better quality than most video capture cards.
For a capture card, I’d go with something that has WDM drivers, rather than VFW. IME, you have to accept that a certain number of frames will be dropped when capping with a VFW card, but not with WDM. In fact, I’ve captured over 2 hours of video without dropping a single frame. My card is the Leadtek Winfast TV2000XP. Price differences between capture cards usually have to do with what software is included, rather than the quality of the card itself (although some cards do have onboard encoders). This shouldn’t really be an issue, because if you’re capturing with VFW, the freeware VirtualDub makes a great capture program. For WDM, use the freeware VirtualVCR.
As for a capture codec, you’ll obviously get the best results if you capture to an uncompressed AVI, but it uses a LOT of disk space. Somewhere on the order of 60GB per hour. You can capture straight to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 or whatever you plan for your final output, but, since it has to encode on the fly, quality will be significantly reduced.
A good compromise is the HuffyUV codec for video capture. The files are about 1/3 the size of uncompressed RGB with very little quality loss. You can then encode the HuffyUV file into MPEG-2 to play on your DVD player or whatever you want.