Capture via USB?

[Dom]

I dont have firewire, or S-VIDEO leads for my cam, the only one it came with was a USB lead..

Whats the best capture program to capture video from my cam via USB? At the moment the only program i can find is Windows Movie Maker, because Pinnicle Studio 8 and Premiere Pro 7 (and Premiere 6.0) say nothing is connected to the comp, is that because theyre looking for S-Video or Firewire connections?

Anyway, what im after is a program that captures good quality video from my cam via the USB connection..

And, is it worth buying a firewire or S-Video lead(s)?

[Marc Peters]

I think I'm correct in saying that if you're using a USB connection, you'll have to install the relevant software that came with your camcorder before you can capture using any app. Hopefully someone will correct me on this

[Immortal25]

USB connection would be slow though and the quality might not be there when you transfer. This goes for USB 2.0 as well I think.
I only have USB 1.1 and that definitely sucks lol

[mrlipring]

usb2.0 CAN work as well as firewire. whether the camera/software's any good while using it, i dunno...

[user]

u said usb 2.0 can work as well as firewire...thats encouraging, because i have a laptop and it doesn't have a firewire port, but i would really like to capture high-quality video. does anyone have any information on which capturing software would be able to capture high quality video with usb 2.0? thanks

[user]

(sorry for posting again)

i have movie maker, but movie maker (although great for being free) doesn't capture quite to my satisfaction. i do have the usb driver and everything.

[Marc Peters]

I think it's more the fact that when capturing from a DV cam via firewire, all you're doing is transferring a stream of data. The DV AVI codec then acts as a "wrapper" for the video so that windows can play it.

When capturing through USB, the data is transfered and encoded to a suitable format as the transfer rate of USB doesn't allow for the flow of DV data/it's from an anlogue source - even if theoretically a USB 2.0 conection is a fast as as firewire!

So really it's not that it's not capable, just that I don't think any cam takes advantage of it Could be wrong

[user]

ooo thank you now i get it. but is there any way i could get at least vhs-quality video? as of now the capture quality is lower than even that.

[Marc Peters]

What's your PC's specs?

[user]

2.6 gig, new comp so plenty of disc space, laptop (if that changes anything?)