Capturing Video (Visual Studtio 8) from Panasonic PV-GS70D

[excelmonkey]

I have a Panasonic PV-GS70D (3CCD) camera. When I shoot video with it, it creates dead spaces between clips. That is, although I shoot clips back to back (their should not be any space between the clips), the camera for some reason has dead space between the clips. So when you go back and review the clips on the camera, when a clip ends with the expectation of a new one starting, the screen goes blue and sometimes can stay blue for long periods of time. This results in me having to fast forward the tape through the dead space. While fast forwarding, the timer will stay idle until the next clip is recognized by the camera. You know the dead space has passed when the timer starts to move again.

Anyways, this causes issues for me when I am trying to capture video from the camera. I would simply like to press Capture Video and let the camcoder run for an hour. However due to the dead space, the capturing automatically stops when the dead space appears. This means I have to baby sit the camcoder while I am capturing video from it. Does anyone know how I can fix this through VS 8.0? I am also contacting Panasonic on this. But was wondering if there was an option in VS 8 that would sense the dead space and start recapture when the dead space had passed.

Thanks

[Ken Berry]

I don't know the quirks of your particular camera, but it sounds as though you are suffering a relatively common problem. A way around it that most professionals (and some of us amateurs) use is this. Before you ever go out to film anything, and with a virgin DV cassette in the camera, leave the lens hood on and simply turn the camera on in REC mode, and let it run all the way through. Then rewind and go out filming. But this way, you will have a continuous time code on the DV tape which VS can "see". It should thus keep running during capture all the way to the end of the tape. And if you set the DV capture (only works with DV format during capture) to 'Split by Scene', then the blue spaces should be detected as individual scenes which you can later simply delete. (Ditto with MPEG captures, but you can only set split by scene after the whole capture has been done.)

I know it sounds a bit of a hassle, and it definitely is time consuming. But you can set the camera and go away and do something else for an hour. And as I say, it is a method many people use with success to avoid the sort of problem you are having.