What is VidCap?

Windows Movie Maker sounds like a possible solution.

Why do you use ScenAlyzer Live?

Are there any additional features or advantages over just capturing with Movie Maker or VidCap?

thanks.

VidCap is the capture software that is included with Vegas. You'll probably find it at C:\Program Files\Sony\Vegas 6.0\vidcap.exe

If all you are doing is capturing live footage direct to hard drive then there really isn't any advantage or disadvantage to any of those capture program.

John Meyer provided the following in an earlier posting regarding Scenealyzer.

Whether its price/many features are valuable to your specific applications should be considered.

Subject: RE: Can those who use "Scenalyzer" please explain it's advantages over Video Capture 3.0 or 4.0?
Reply by: johnmeyer
Date: 4/1/2004 12:40:32 PM

I ALWAYS use Scenalyzer. I find the capture application built into Vegas to be limited in a huge number of ways, awkward to use, non-intuitive interface, etc.

The things that make Scenalyzer special:

1. You can see a timeline representation of each clip, and can scrub and playback directly from these clips. (Press down on the wheel on your mouse to play from that position; press and hold the left mouse button and drag across the clip to scrub; hold the ALT key while scrubbing to only go a frame at a time). You can also use this facility to do explore the video clips in any folder.

2. You can select any grouping of clips and record them back to tape directly from Scenalyzer.

3. You can use timers to start and stop your capture.

4. You can do time lapse capture and stop motion capture.

4a. Let me repeat that: You can do time lapse capture and stop motion capture. Really amazing.

5. You can do optical scene detection, during capture, of analog footage that is being "passed through" your camcorder. Not perfect, but a good starting point.

6. You can batch capture, even on a tape that has interrupted timecode.

7. You can capture the second DV audio track (if you have dubbed a voice over on your tape), either as the main channel, or onto a separate WAV file which you can them place in Vegas below your main audio channel. Nice. Actually, more than nice. This is essential if you use two mics (as many pros do) and have two audio channels on your tapes.

8. You can export stills directly from the Scenalyzer timeline. You can do this in Vegas too, but if you don't get everything set just right (or use a script) you will almost certainly end up with a resolution other than the 720x480 (for NTSC) that you started with.

9. You can preview your clips in up to full-screen, directly from the AVI DV file (i.e., the preview window can be made full screen).

10. You can choose from several different file naming conventions.

I have never found a single reason to use the Vegas capture application instead (i.e., there is no feature that Vegas has that is lacking in Scenalyzer, or at least nothing that I have yet needed to use).

OK, sounds interesting.

The other software option we are looking at is DV-Rack by Serious Magic.

They claim their software will help you better setup your cam for the conditions.

Cost more but looks interesting.

Any comments on DV Rack?

thanks again for all the help.
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Very usefull BUT.
You need more CPU power as it's doing more than just capturing the video. I've read some reports of A/V sync problems during long captures and if you're going to run it on more than one PC at a time I think you need to buy a licence for each one, would get rather expensive.
All that you are doing is copying data coming down the firewire cable to a file on the hard disk, this is a no brainer compared to capturing from tape, tools such as DV Rack and SCLive are a waste of money and CPU power for such a trivial task, VidCap or WMM are no cost solutions to a simple problem, i.e. less to go wrong.
Bob.

I have always liked the Scenalyzer capture software for its smooth interface and added features. Although I don't use ALL the options, it's nice to know they're available. You can download a free trial to see if its right for you.
Here's Another Thread that puts a positive spin on Scenalyzer.

wouldn't use anything else - scenalyzer does it for me!

leslie

Ditto.