Hey guys, sorry about the off-topic post but yet again the vast bank of knowledge here is a lot easier to use then searching through the web. First off all I am using a Windows machine and not a MAC as all the resourses seem to point to a mac for this kind of thing. Secondly I have gotten this to work. Though poorly. I used Roxio EZCD 5 to burn my video to a Disc and it played fine in my home DVD player but with a lot of compression artifacts and poor quality audio with pops and clicks... hmmm... sorta like a bad mp3 :)

Does anyone have any suggestions on a good video capture program that will take the input from a firewire device, let you cut up the film into many clips, organize it properly, and then save into a higher quality video feed than I have already gotten from mine. One thing I did notice was that my audio setting were at 8kbits (I think) but when I tried to save the video with 48,000 audio and double the NTSC video resolution the program gave up on me telling me I didn't have enough free space. I checked and there was 19 gigs free. The videoclip in question was about 6 minutes long.

Anybody have some good advice.


Having pulled my wedding movie from DV back in January, I have some experience here.

a> Most of the Windows products Suck. I think you found that.
b> Free space issue is PROBABLY the 2G limit on AVI files from Windows...

Now then, I found the best results for my systems were:

Linux. Yes, once again, the magical OS from heaven saves the day..... There is firewire support in the 2.4 kernels. It works Very well in my experience. In particular, dvgrab does a REALLY nice job. It will take the input from your camera, and split it into avi files of defineable size, and/OR whenever the DV stream was interrupted.

Let me explain that a little more, simply because I didn't realize the miniDV stuff did this. Whenever you start and stop recording, including pausing, the DV system makes a notation in the stream. DVgrab creates a seperate file whenever it sees this. This allowed me to very easily organize certain sections. It also allowed me to get mad at the photographer in question, as in my wedding, he hit that damn pause button every other second, it appeared. (it actually wasn't THAT bad during the wedding, but before and after, I had something like 80-90 5-10 second clips.)

So, after trying the firewire support in windows programs, I ended up using this simply because it worked SO much better than anything else. Windows programs gave me a ton of grief with audio synchro, and frame loss (on 800Mhz processors going to raid arrays... bandwidth was NOT a problem.)

For actually editting the clips into a single movie, I used Premier and Media studio. Media studio came with my firewire card, and worked pretty well.

Encoding the files to vcd and svcd I used, (I think) bbmpeg. It was either that or flaskmpeg.

I've still got the original avi files and cut/merge sheets on a drive array so that when DVD drives become more affordable, I'll burn it out in full DVD resolution.