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Ok, just got my first ever Cam - a Sony HC30E. Now, I'm so far impressed
with the camera, but oh dear, video capture has been a nightmare. My PC
only has USB 1.1 and this is what I've used to stream the video. Now I
realise that this speed transfer is too slow, but my question is this: will
this affect the quality of the capture or should it just take longer?

OK, I KNOW I need firewire for DV, but what software? The c**p that came
with the Cam is the most pitiful excuse for software I have ever had the
misfortune to use - Sony should be ashamed. Tried Pinnacle 9 and the
default Windows Moviemaker software that comes with XP. Both seem OK - to a
point; but neither fulfils my expectations. I'm savvy with DivX/XviD
encoding and all I want is a decent MPEG file to mess around with. Pinnacle
produces unusable MPEGs and WMV is just that. Tried Vegas 5, but that just
crashed on trying to run the vid capture program within.

Back to Pinnacle 9, which seems the best of a bad bunch so far. The raw AVI
produced is nothing I've ever seen before - and is it really an MPEG4 file,
gspot doesn't think so? The only players that seem to show this file are
MPC and VLC (incorrect colours though). BSplayer and WMP crash trying to
play these, but I can import into VirtualDub to 'play' with. And as
mentioned the MPEGs (1 or 2) produced are unusable in anything, including
VirtualDub.

I expect Adobe Premier is the next step, but HOW MUCH?!?!?

Please help a newbie get to grips with all this - all I want is a simple
capture program that will give me something I can play around with in
VirtualDub or Nandub, encode to DivX/XviD and let me get on.

Thanks

Kj


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"KillingJoke" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...

> Please help a newbie get to grips with all this - all I want is a simple
> capture program that will give me something I can play around with in
> VirtualDub or Nandub, encode to DivX/XviD and let me get on.

You are going to need to get a firewire card and cable to get started and
this will be about £30 and will probably come with some nasty software which
you are best binning. At least XP supports firewire so you only need a
capture programme like dvio http://www.carr-engineering.com/dvio.htm (that's
what i use anyway) and these files should play wine in vlc & mpc.

To open your dv file in virtualdub you will probably neede the panasonic dv
codec http://users.tpg.com.au/mtam/install_panvfwdv.htm and then you can
save from virtualdub using the xvid/divx codec.
http://users.tpg.com.au/mtam/software.htm has some useful information on
software

Thank you both Adrian and Tony for your informative replies. :-)


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