firewire capture resolution

williamc wrote on 1/26/2005, 8:31 AM
Using Sony ScreenBlast Movie Studio v3. Playback device is a Canon XL1 camera connected via 1394 firewire. Normal capture at 720 x 576 works fine. Trying to set the capture resolution to reduce disk storage requirements. I'd like to capture at say 320 x 240.

In the capture menu under 'video' appear two options:

- Microsoft DV Camera and VTR Properties...
- Microsoft DV Camera and VTR Capture Properties...

The latter is greyed out and all features for setting resolution are disabled. From reading about how firewire capture is done in other products, I gather that 'quality' is selectable, and that if the hardware and Windows drivers are properly configured, I *should* be able to control the capture resolution.

Can someone tell me how to enable this feature?

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 1/26/2005, 9:31 AM
Technically, it isn't a "capture" in the traditional analog sense. A IEEE-1394 "Firewire" transfer from the camera to the computer is just that, a transfer, it is just like copying a file from one disc to another. DV video is fixed at 720x576 PAL (or 720x480 NTSC) at around 3.8 megabytes/sec and that's done in the camera. Once you transfer the video onto the hard drive, you could resize it down to 320x240, but that would take up even more disc space during the conversion and you would have to use a different codec because DV does not support 320x240 resolution.

John
taliesin wrote on 1/26/2005, 9:39 AM
Firewire-capturing of dv means copying files. There is no way of taking control of settings. It's just file-copying.

Marco
rmack350 wrote on 1/26/2005, 9:42 AM
I don't really think you can do that, at least not in Vegas 3, 4, or 5.

DV capture is a straight-out, bit for bit transfer of data from tape to your PC. It's possible that some programs will resample your video but Vegas doesn't do that, and I assume that Screenblast and Studio behave the same way.

Looking at the trial of Scenalyzer, I don't see this sort of option there either. I think it depends on the capture card. If you've got an analog card I'm sure you can set these options.

Rob Mack
scifly2 wrote on 1/26/2005, 1:43 PM
I dont know if screenblast will do this, Vegas 4 does, but if you dont need everything on the tape in your project, consider logging clips for batch capture. That gets only the video you need with less space used on the hard drive.
williamc wrote on 1/28/2005, 7:16 AM
Understand better now, thanks for the help.
filmy wrote on 1/28/2005, 7:44 AM
Vegas/Screenblast does not offer 'offline' resolution, which is what you are asking about. There are other programs that do offer it, however most people tend to just capture full resolution anymore with Hard Drives being so cheap.

SClive has a new version coming out that *may* offer offline res, right now they call it "indexing" with an option to "capture video and audio at lower resolution". I don't really like Pinnacle stuff however Studio version 9 (under $80.00) does offer offiline options as well as a few other neat little things. For me the overall is not worth dumping Vegas, but for the price I was amazed at the ability to do offline edits.