Video Capture Failure

[fredty]

After installing Video Studio X4, I was unable to capture video from my Canon HV10 using the 1394a interface (firewire). Corel support was not helpful. Oddly enough, the earlier versions of Videostudio also started giving problems even though they had worked before. I found a temporary work-around. Videostudio X2 would work if I turned the camera on (play mode) after entering the capture window of X2. This trick would not work with X4 and was too annoying to tolerate long term.

Eventually, I found that this is a common problem for Windows 7 users. For many firewire cards, you need to use the "legacy" driver not the default one. There are several spots on the web documenting the solution. Once I changed to the legacy driver, everything seems to work just great.

to make the change:
1- Click the Start Button, type devmgmt.msc in the “Start Search” box and press Enter.
2- Expand the "IEEE 1394 Bus Host Controllers" node in the device tree on the right hand pane
(alternatively to 1&2, open the device manager via the control panel)
3- Right click the host controller node select "Update driver software ..."
4- Select "Browse my computer for driver software"
5- Select "let me pick from a list of device driver on my computer ..." and Check the box before “Show compatible hardware”.
6. Choose the second option---1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller (Legacy), and click next to update the driver.

Based on what I have seen on other websites, this cures not only video capture problems, but also some other firewire device problems including communications with disk drives. Oddly enough, I did not have a problem with this for a long time when running Windows 7. It is possible that upgrades to Window 7 or components may have caused the problem to appear.

[Ron P.]

You're correct, I posted about this a few days ago..

[Ken Berry]

Qujite apart from this problem, I in any case do all my HDV captures these days using a small freeware program called HDVSplit, which also uses firewire. It has the advantage implicit in its naming of splitting the incoming video by scene. And you can name your files instead of using Video Studio's arcane naming system.