HDV Split is in my toolbelt.

j razz

HDVSplit .77b

yeah scene detection pukes as well.. with a Z1 it was pretty flaky in V6, so i turned it off after the first capture nuked every cut

with an A1 on V7 its about 10 to 15 frames off.. to be honest, i think its a GOP issue through timecode breaks.
I believe HDV split uses optical analyses to create splits.. im not sure.. i could be wrong

Another vote for HDV Split.

Capture in general must surely be rising to the top of Sony's to-do-list. Would love to see fully flexible filenaming, like HDVSplit has, and also of course accurate scene detection.

Do you recommend HDVSplit before the Vegas HD capture?

Is there still issues regarding dropped sound in HDVSplit (I mainly capture "live", on site, to drive)?

Is there some way, like for DV capture in Vegas, to have the m2t files split in sections of a fixed file size? It would be good to have pieces of 4.5 GB for easy backup (until BR discs are here).

Yet another vote for HDVSplit.

Capture in general must surely be rising to the top of Sony's to-do-list.
Can't speak for Sony, obviously, but I sure wouldn't count on it.
Why put many resources into a dying practice? With all camcorders becoming file-based very quickly, and the capture app working just fine for most?
we capture several hours of footage a week, and have no issues.
However, we also don't log, and don't need anything outside of hitting Record, and go.

If someone can explain ti me how it would be possible to capture from HDV tape at any point other than an I frame I'll be mighty impressed. As far as I know it is impossible to decode a frame of HDV without the preceeding frames all the way back to the I frame at the start of the GOP.
So the old log and capture way of working died with HDV.
Well for me it never lived, shuttling miniDV tapes is nuts.

Bob.

I surely hope that NLE providers aren't listening to you just yet on this.

My employers just took a month long shooting trip to the Galapagos. They must have spent all of 5 minutes weighing tape vs solid state before opting for tape. They were going to be up in the countryside, on boats, all over the place, and decided that it'd be much more practical to bring a few boxes of tape than it'd be to carry a laptop and hope it survived the trip. They just wouldn't have been able to dump the cards to the laptop during the day, and they'd have wanted a way to archive the media off the laptop anyway.

It's not foolproof, but tape is pretty robust.

Rob Mack

We do regular product shoots on DV and we log during the shoot. Been doing it this way for years and years. If we switched to HDV (and we never will, according to the guy with the checkbook) we'd still log when it made sense.

It's a real bad idea for NLE vendors to ignore some workflows just because they're not used by a majority of users. Logging is incredibly useful and I'd much rather see vendors provide good useful logging tools than to see them just drop a good feature.

A better course would be to put a little time into smarter logging tools. First off is to make it possible to import a log file (TXT, XLS, DOC), which Vegas can't do, even at version 9. Pitiful and amatuerish! Second route, given the small size of DV and HDV, I guess I could live with a system that could capture an entire tape and let me log and divvy up the digital media. It wouldn't kill me if the capture tool added a little head and tail to my selections to account for I-frames, just so long as it could output the corrected log back to a text file.

Rob Mack

A B or P frame may also contain all of the image information, or in other words, be an I frame by another name.

I'll take your word for that, I'm no guru on mpeg-2
However even so, unless each and every frame can be decoded I don't see how you can position the head with preroll and just start capturing from a given frame number. As far as I can tell no NLE supports batch capture of HDV. There might be a way to do it, you'd have to transcode on the fly to an intermediate codec so maybe Avid can pull this off.

Even so I don't get why it's such a necessity.

Bob.

Somewhere on my office computer (I'm in Asia at the moment) I've got a paper (I believe it's from LAMP) on frame encoding. IIRC, the issue isn't the frame content, it's the T/C associated with the frame.
Hugo Gagglioni explained this to me a few years back when MPEG was first hitting the HDV streets, but I'd have to refer to his power point (also back home).
If it's an important issue to someone, I'll look when I get back to the States.

It'd be good if you could. Certainly not an issue for me as I've never even batch captured DV but it's a big issue for one Vegas user down here and I know this keeps cropping up on this forum. I've always assumed it had something to do with the how the mpeg-2 is encoded but if in fact it's another issue lets put it to rest (correctly) once and for all.

But here's an interesting thing. We've got a M25 VCR which has 9 pin serial control and an old RM45 edit controller. With that we seem to be able to get frame accurate positioning of the M25 with HDV. It'd be interesting to try an assemble edit between two M25s. Maybe the batch capture thing is possible but just not over firewire.

Bob.

a second(er) to bob, re looking into it spot.

frankly this 'all aboard the file express' sucks big time. bob has had enough whining from me, but here i go again, many of my clients are pro's (old pro's that is), and to them the very thought of dealing with computer footage is an anathema. they prefer sitting in their lounge room watch burnt in tc on regular tv's with a pad and pencil - they give me paper cuts, rough cut edl's from which i batch capture and then we fine cut. this 'file' system might sound mighty fine to a generation who know know better, but having a decently logged tape on a shelf and the ability to pop it into a deck and get 3 seconds out of it exactly where you want in the time it takes to pop it out of its case and into a deck literally puts the boot in storing hd's all over the place....

i've started shooting hd, but i'm pretty pissed off with this lack of time code and i think sony SHOULD be thinking about how professionals will be using their cameras and software. i have to say i was very happy when the next gen of hd camcorders went back to recording tape as well.

people might be crying 'tape is dead,long live the flash card', but there's a fair few luddites around who know better....

leslie

people might be crying 'tape is dead,long live the flash card', but there's a fair few luddites around who know better....

Remember, I'm one of those Luddites. And we've embraced tapeless at every turn, ranging from XDCAM (which kicks the pants off of tape-based) to recording HDV on HDD systems. The files are stored on a SAN, accessible from virtually anywhere we want to access them or give clients access. Clients rarely come to our facility any longer, and there is little need.I can give them a window burn over the web *much* faster than I can dub a tape w/burn and send it to them.
Tape isn't dead yet, but it's going to be, and prepping for it sooner than later is probably the best approach.
IMO, making the complete switch to file-based at the same time as completing switching to HD is ideal.