Anyone get HDLink to work w/ HDR-HC1 ?

Brainwrek wrote on 10/11/2005, 7:43 PM

I've been struggling to get Cineform's HDLink (v 2.0) to split scenes properly with my new HDR-HC1. I have 6 tapes full of content and have tried all 6 tapes, but it *never* works right. If it splits the scenes at all, it's usually in the wrong places (ie, right in the middle of a scene). this behavior is very erratic it occasionally gets the right spot, but rarely. And many times it will not split anything at all.

I've tried with AVI conversion both on and off. Same erratic behavior in both instances.

Any ideas? I'm sure the program would be worth the price of admission, if it would work right with my camera.

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 10/11/2005, 7:49 PM

Sounds like you've got a system problem, as opposed to a CineForm problem. Contact Thad at CineForm, he'll be able to directly help you pinpoint the problem.
I've used the A1 and HC1 with the CineForm app, and had no problems like you describe at all. Scene detection is sometimes sketchy with HDV, but it shouldn't be as bad as you're experiencing.
How fast is your machine?

Laurence wrote on 10/11/2005, 7:57 PM

It works really well with My HVR-A1 and P4 3.01. There's a lot of caching going on when you use this program. How much memory do you have?

Brainwrek wrote on 10/11/2005, 8:40 PM

Thanks for the replies guys.

I'm using my new Dell machine. 3.6Ghz Dual Xeons. 2Gb RAM.

What version(s) of HDLink are you guys using? Wondering if it is a glitch in v2.0 ?

Brainwrek wrote on 10/11/2005, 8:42 PM

One other thought. Do I have to do something special with the camera to designate scene splits? All I do is push the record button to start a scene and push it again to end it. Nothing else. Does there need to be blank space between scenes or something?

Laurence wrote on 10/12/2005, 8:24 AM

Did you set the clock on the camera when you bought it? I know that not doing this causes scene splitting not to work properly on many DV cameras.

Laurence wrote on 10/12/2005, 8:29 AM

Also, are you writing to a NTFS format disc? If you are writing to a FAT32 format disc (the way all external drives come formatted) it will spit files at (I believe) 4 gig marks as FAT 32 can't handle bigger files. In the case of M2T files, this would split the file at pretty short increments before they were further split by the HDLink's scene detection, and could lead to exactly what you are describing.

Brainwrek wrote on 10/12/2005, 6:10 PM

Thank you for your ideas, Laurence. Yes, my HD is NTFS. And yes my clock is set properly. I hadn't thought about the clock setting, but I just double checked it and it's all good.

I'm really baffled by it all. I guess I'll just forget HDLink all together. Capture each tape to a single (huge) M2T file and split the scenes manually. :(

Good news is I don't have to spend $200 on HDLink, I guess...though it would be worth it if it would work right.

Laurence wrote on 10/13/2005, 12:00 AM

Wierd. It works great on my lessor system.

By the way, if you want to split the huge M2T files without quality loss, the MPEG Wizard program at womble.com does this beautifully. It smart-renders mpeg the way that Vegas smart-renders DV. Once the M2T files are split, they really do handle much better.

Laurence wrote on 10/13/2005, 12:03 AM

One last thing: did you check the latest version of HDConnect? It was just updated to version 2 (from 1.something) a couple of days ago.

Brainwrek wrote on 10/13/2005, 12:16 AM

Thank you again for the replies Laurence. I will check out womble right away. And yes, I am using v2.0.2 of HDLink.

Laurence wrote on 10/13/2005, 6:58 AM

The Womble editor is really interesting to me. It is really quite simple, nowhere near enough functionality to do a full project or anything, but it does work extremely smoothly with native HDV M2T files without any kind of proxies. Nobody else seems to be able to do this, in fact it seems to be generally recognized as impossible without tremendous CPU power. Womble shows that it is possible.

I also use the Womble editor for re-editing DVDs. It works really well for simple edits on DVDs because it smart renders the mpeg 2 video on the DVD. I can do simple edits on a DVD with an extra generation only on the tiny bit where a transition was applied on the edit. This is fast and for all practical purposes, loses no quality whatsoever.

apit34356 wrote on 10/13/2005, 5:29 PM

thanks Laurence for the info about the Womble editing HDV M2T files. I was going to test it out, but got sidetracked in Aug. Womble editor is a good starting tool, Sony should pickup the product line for the HDV consumer market and include it with the HDV camera line.