Capture Problem from Newby

interadd · Post by **interadd** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 10:36 pm

Hi All
I have just bought a Panasonic Mini DV Camcorder NV GS60, i have a Pinnacle capture card but a old version not compatable with mini DV. A friend recommended Ulead, i have down loaded the trial version but get the error message unable to start capture module, the camera has a firewire port and a USB port my PC has only USB and no spare PCI slots to add a firewire card, if i use the microsoft moviemaker i can capture the video and sound and burn to DVD. but not with Ulead. Can anyone help please,

Clevo · Post by **Clevo** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 10:55 pm

You will need to capture witha firewire port in VS

Ulead VS is a editing program primarily, though it can capture too.

Capture in moviemaker and edit in VS is your solution.

interadd · Post by **interadd** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 11:05 pm

Thanks for the advice, i have seen on the web a firewire to USB cable will this do the trick or will i need a firewire card.

Clevo · Post by **Clevo** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 11:07 pm

interadd wrote:Thanks for the advice, i have seen on the web a firewire to USB cable will this do the trick or will i need a firewire card.

That's just a converter of the plug.

Firewire card will be ideal if you have room to stick it in and you'll find that you capture more smoothly with firewire because it offers a steadier bandwidth to capture with.

interadd · Post by **interadd** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 11:17 pm

Thanks, i guess i will have to remove my wifi card and purchase a firewire card and usb wifi adaptor.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 11:19 pm

A couple of comments. Windows Movie Maker can only capture in two formats -- DV/AVI and the Microsoft native format .wmv. Connecting via USB, I think you will find that WMM has captured as .wmv and you have converted that to to DVD compatible mpeg-2 to burn to DVD. I won't comment on the likely quality or time it takes for the conversion. However, I will say that capturing and editing in DV format will be the only way to get the highest quality results from your camera.

For a camera like yours, the USB cable is mainly meant to transfer still photos taken by the camera. It is only a USB 1.0 connection, and too slow for transferring high quality video. At most, you would only be able to get low quality streaming video such as might be suitable for use on the web.

That Firewire to USB cable came out a couple of years ago. I confess I was sceptical at the time, but I have not seen any reference to it, let alone a review of its operation to be able to comment. But if you do go that way, then please let us know how it works out.

Otherwise, if you are serious about video editing, then you might just have to sit down and work out the priorities for what you have connected to your existing PCI slots. If, for instance, you have a modem card in one of them, then you might not need it any longer if you have an external broadband modem; or else an external dial-up modem could serve the same purpose and free up the PCI slot for a firewire card. Firewire is the only way to get high quality video from your camera.

There are, of course, external capture devices which will allow you to capture good quality mpeg-2 via USB. But you have to get a good quality one. I hear good things about the Adstech DVD Express DX2 which has a hardware chip embedded in it to do the hard work, rather than burden your computer with it. However, the downside is that often (like the Adstech devices), you have to use the software which comes with the device for the captures (in the case of Adstech, it is called CapWiz). You then import the captured video into VS for editing and authoring. The other downside is that mpeg-2 is much more temperamental to edit than DV, and you can encounter problems such as out of sync audio and video by going that route.

interadd · Post by **interadd** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 11:28 pm

Thanks to you all, i think that i would like the better quality video so i feel that i will have to remove the wifi or look to see if i can get a express pci firewire cable as this is the only slot on the motherboard thats free, this dell pc only has 2 pci, 1 mini express and 1 other express pci slot. i have a pinnacle capture card, a wifi card and a express pci graphics card.

Thanks all for your help.

Post by **Ken Berry** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 11:35 pm

Personally, I would remove the Pinnacle card and replace it with a Firewire card. If you are later in a situation where you need to capture from some external analogue source, your camera should be able to be used as a pass-through device converting the analogue source material to digital DV and transmitting it over the firewire connection in higher quality than you would ever get from the Pinnacle card. Or you could buy an external USB capture device. The ones available today are a lot better than the older models.

The alternative would be to buy, as you first suggested, a USB WiFi dongle. These are for the most part as good as an internal WiFi card, and about the same price. I have seen them here in Australia for as low as US$30, and in fact am thinking of getting one for one of my older back-up computers which also has a full slate of PCI cards already...

I have never seen or heard of a PCI Express firewire card, though they may exist...