Thanks,
That will do it... now just to find some used ones.

Use a second computer. Capture half your tapes on one and half on the other. Cut your capture time in half

Kirk.

Outside the box... great thinking and way less expensive that the nnovia. I have both Vegas 5 and 6 so that is definitely a very plausible solution as I also have 2 available computers. Great idea; I love this forum.

j razz

Actually, the answer is yes ... well, sort of.

Scenalyzer has a high speed capture function. It will capture an entire one-hour tape in about five minutes. Using the Scenalyzer preview functions, you can scrub through your capture and mark which scenes you REALLY want to use. You then press a button, and Scenalyzer controls your camera to go back and capture just those scenes you really need.

I know this isn't exactly what you are asking for, but for situations where you are only going to use a small percentage of what you actually shot, this can be a real timesaver.

Pinnacle's Studio had a similar capture feature, and you could even do your edits on the timeline with the low-res "proxies." When you were finished editing, it would go back and capture, in high-res, only the actual footage needed. However, as I remember, that capture was not high speed, just low res, and therefore not particularly useful, except as a way to reduce disk storage, something no longer that interesting, now that disks are so large and cheap.

DVCPro 25 can be captured at 2X, you do need a compliant VCR and I haven't got a clue how VidCap would go dealing with it.
XDCAM can be captured at, well you don't need to 'capture', you only need to edit the proxies and they're almost instantaneous to ingest.
Bob.

Ulead has this also, where you can speed thru and capture at high speed, mark, and capture based on thumbnails. If it did anything other than type 1 avi, it might actually be useful.

I have run multiple instances of Scenalyzer to "capture" from three cameras at once. I would have tested with more simultaneous captures but I ran out of cameras.

Steve Mann

Can any MiniDV camera play another MiniDV tape? For example, can I play my Sony FX1 tapes in a Canon GL2?

Thanks,
Duncan

Not if they're HDV encoded DV tapes, no. If you shoot HDV on the FX1, then the Canon GL2 will play them back. The FX1 however, will play any other DV tape you might have, other than the JVC 24p or Canon 24f flavors.

With Scenelyzer do you capture to seperate hard drives with the 3 camera set up?

So if I shoot HDV on a standard MiniDV tape (FX1) I am good on the GL2 but if I purchase HDV encoded tapes no go?

Or did you mean I am fine if I shoot DV on the FX1 but not fine if I shoot HDV...

If you shoot HDV, you MUST capture with an HDV camcorder.
If you shoot DV, you can capture DV with either an HDV or DV camcorder.
No DV camcorder can play back tapes containing HDV acquired video.
All HDV camcorders can play back tapes containing DV acquired video.

Thanks, that helps.

Duncan

I don't recall my disc setup, but I plugged three cameras into a Firewire hub, put in three tapes, and opened three instances of Scenalyzer. In each instance I selected a camera and started capture. They ran for fifteen minutes with no errors or dropped frames, so I ended the test. It would make sense to use different drives for the capture.

Steve Mann

Steve,

How do you tell if you had capture errors or dropped frames?

I want to know because I'm going to try exactly what you did... capture from 3 cams to one computer.

I'm going go use 3 firewire cards however and do the capturer to a single external drive... so the drive with the capture program and OS isn't overworked.

I may end up with 3 external hard disk... one for each cam... but I want to try a single external drive first...

If anyone else has done this let me know... I would like to hear your setup.

And... Steve... what kind of computer... speed, memory, etc... were you using?

thanks for any help or comments.

and yet another solution...

we try to use DV Rack in a laptop, as much as possible.

Not only are you getting "live capture", there is no limit on how long that capture can be - a real lifesaver for any event over 60 (or 48) minutes in length.

Plus you've got a "real" picture (I just got whooped again by trusting an analog monitor) - plus waveform/vectorscope and audio tracking.

Any time we can we use the DV Rack. (and no I don't work for them)

If you use Scenalyzer, you can tell it to stop capture if there are any frame drops. Since the only acceptable number for dropped frames is ZERO, I always set that option in Scenalyzer. Once in a blue moon, if I'm doing way too many other things on the computer during capture, it will in fact drop a frame.