Hello all, I'm new here so don't hold it against me.

I've got a dv camcorder directly hooked up to my PC via firewire. The task I need to accomplish is for me to be able to view live video, somewhat fullscreen (no 3x5 windows), and the ability to take/save snapshots while the video is being viewed live.

I appreciate any advice you can give.

I hope I understand what you want.

Connect your camera to a TV using the video leads that probably came with it, this will give you realtime full screen from the camera. All new panasonics give you the ability to take snapshots to an SD card whilst recording video, and can be done from the remote control, you don't say what camera you have, but it may have the same features.

Using this method will give you live output, stills on an SD card an the video recorded to tape, so you could edit the whole lot together later if you wished.

Mike.

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Just use the setup you describe, instead of having the camera in playback mode keep the camera in record mode and you will get a live picture feed to the capture window. And depending on what software you have, it miight have a snapshot button, that will save your pictures to jpeg or bmp format. This way the pictures will be recorded directly onto your hard disk. The downside is they will only be the same size as a video frame either 720 x 576 or 720 x 480, if you want bigger then you'll have to record them onto a media card first.

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