Hi,

Googled to this site and am very impressed...lots of useful info, just what I was looking for...very helpful.

OK, as stated I am a complete noob to this area, in fact only aquired my first ever camcorder a few days ago.

Now, as my shiney new Canon MV750i has DV facility I wanted, obviously, to store my recordings onto DVD via my computer rather than hook up the camera to VHS with S-Video.

I thought this would be simple....what an oversight!?!

Forget fancy editing etc..that may come later...all I want to get right at this point in time is the capture.

The nitty gritty.....XP Home SP2 running on Athlon 2500+ using IEEE-1394 DVin built in to the mobo (Asus A7N8Xdeluxe). 512MB memory, 128MB ATI Radeon 9600 grfx. HD is 120GB Maxtor Diamondplus9 (7200rpm, 133, 8MB buffer) with 2 partitions C: approx 40GB and D: approx 80GB

Using D: to write my captured files to, which I defragged as recommended by this site (wasn't too fragmented anyway, but I wanted to ensure all bases were covered)....and I checked that DMS was enabled also.

I disconnect from internet, disabling my LAN connection, disabled Norton AntiVirus, firewall etc, disabled screensaver.....pretty much ensuring minimal background tasks are running as I normally do when burning CD and DVD.

Now my intention was to use Nero VisionExpress 3 which is part of the Nero 6 Reloaded package to capture film and then later I can trial the mpeg2 encoding facility and DVD writing facility of the Nero package.

But can I get a decent capture.....the h311 I can :evil:

I've tried Windows MovieMaker just in case Nero was at fault but no, results are similar.

Essentially, from the info from you guys I'm OK with the combing effect which is down to interlacing, which I understand will not be evident on DVD when played on standard TV display. So thats fine (acceptable)

The real problem is the frame loss.
Try to capture in raw DV format (avi) I lose 1 frame for every 4 that is successfully captured.

Ironicaly, Nero VisionExpress has an alternative 'template' to DV being DVD (I'm guessing this is just encoding captured signal 'on-the-fly' into mpeg2 format ready to be burnt to DVD disks) which appears to capture fine for first 30-40 seconds after which point info starts to be 'buffered to HD' when frames start to be lost albeit at an improved ratio than the direct DV capture.

My plea then.....forget the DVD option and the encoding issue, I don't want to confuse matters,....what am I doing wrong on the raw DV capture? Or is their a problem with my hardware/software setup?

If a helpful person needs more info from me, please ask, I'm a bit annoyed with myself that using my MiniDV camcorder is not as straightfoward as I imagined. Bought it especially for the birth of my first child,...partner currently in hospital being induced so may be a bit delayed in responding for any requests for more info, but I will monitor this forum as regularly as poss over the next few days.

Sorry for long post and hope everyone has a good new year (whilst I'll be in hospital comforting the missus).

Cheers.

My first thought was the HD was a problem.

However my HD is a relatively modern one, albeit EIDE rather than SATA, not abused and, as stated in original post, defragged to ensure optimum conditions.

How critical is the 'quality' of the DV lead?

Wouldn't have thought it'd matter too much, considering the lead from the rear of the PC to the mobo looks fairly basic.
Only the cable I'm using (2m length) only cost £2.50
But the last thing I want to do is pay £20+ for a branded cable (Belkin?) from PCWorld if this isn't gonna make a noticeable difference.

Apologies if these posts are in wrong (software) forum (when it may be a hardware problem) only capture problems seem to be discussed more here.

Also noticed a new user 'Deph' posting about similar 'frame loss' problems in the Adobe forum. And he has a higher spec PC to me.

There must be a simpler way to get lossless capture to AVI :cry:

Don't mind upgrading (spending more money ) as long as I know that the upgrade would definitely solve the frame loss....any ideas....anyone?

OK replying as requested (thanks fro the name drop ).

In the other thread you mentioned that you were using the direwire port from the motherboard. This should be ok. From memory, it;s the one in graphics and sound cards I've heard of problems with. However, as a test, if you have a friedn with a PCI firewire card then borrow it for an afternoon and see ifthe problem goes away.

And as for a PCI foirewire card costing £25 - that would be an expensive one nowadays. £120-£12 would be more my estimation.

No promises though.

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Cheers bud, no-one else is replying, maybe they're all as stumped as me.

In that case I feel that the facility on the Asus mobo is probably ok then, as Asus kit serves me well in all other aspects so don't see why the IE1394 chipset should be sub-standard.

Thats my problem, got no friends or family with DigiCams connected up to their computer to compare notes with. :cry:

You use that quote a lot, I notice.
Thanks anyway for your input.

Anyone else have any ideas what is wrong with my setup, there must be something fundamentaly problematic with my kit?
Whilst looking at firewire cards on ebuyer I read literally dozens of reviews saying "I got the card...blah blah.....and was capturing from my DigiCam in minutes...."

So it can't be that difficult, can it?

Just a guess, but have you enabled write caching on the disk?

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Remember, there is always more to learn than there is to teach.

Thought you were onto something there.....but yes, checked the HDD properties and caching is indeed enabled. :cry:

Wahey, finally found a capture method that works (no dropped frames)....
capturing direct to highest quality wmv format with Windows MovieMaker :o

However, I realise that this is not lossless as would straight DV-AVI capture.

I'll be so p155ed off if the resulting DVDs are no better than VHS recorded through S-video lead :evil:

Now could someone confirm how low a spec computer I could get away with purely in the 'capture' stage.....my other idea is to add a firewire card to my other computer (lower spec than my main computer) in case my main computer is just somehow incompatible. If I could get good DV-AVI files written to a DVD data disc and pick them back up on my main computer for editing/processing/encoding/DVD authoring. Mad idea, I know, but hey, I'm not gonna let this lie.

Thanks for any help anyone may offer.

Many, many, many years* ago, I used to capture via firewire using a PIII 600MHz with 256MB of RAM.

*about 5 years

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Might give it a go then....my other computer is an early P4 with 512MB RDRam (Dell 8100) can't remember offhand what the HD spec is tho.

OS is WinME I think...can't recall.

But on reflection, I fear the Recordable drive is only CD, and AVI files are huge,...oh bugga :evil:

I'll think of a way round this if it kills me I'll have to take a proper look tomorrow.

Thanks for the reply Marc

backup, reformat and reinstall!

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