More Print to Camcorder P:roblems

RichMitt wrote on 3/10/2005, 9:56 PM
I spoke too soon. After successfully exporting a half-dozen projects from Movie Studio 3 to my camcorder, I hit a brick wall again tonight. I get the following message

"The device 'Microsoft DV Camera and VCR' could not be opened. Please make sure that it is turned on and is not being used by another application or user."

It was turned on in the VCR mode. Enable DV Device Control is checked in Preferences. I tried the Dell Movie Studio as well as the Microsoft device control.driver. I rebooted several times and even reinstalled Movie Studio. Nothing seems to work any more (although it was working perfectly earlier).

I suspect there may be a problem with the way my 1-year old Sony camcorder is set up.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

A peculiar thing is that multiple copies of Movie Studio come up when I try to hook up with the camcorder. First I start with Movie Studio up, and when I turn on the camcorder, another copy comes up. Sometimes as I tinker around, I will get three or four copies up. So I shut all down but one before going to the Video Capture screen to simplify the process.

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 3/11/2005, 9:48 AM
Well, the fact that MovieStudio comes up when you plug in your camcorder is a good sign. It means your capture driver is linked to MS.

Next time, don't open MovieStudio first. Just plug in your cam and let it start MovieStudio for you.

Of greater concern is the fact that multiple MovieStudios are opening up for you. That could be a sign that your firewire cable or connection is bad or has some sort of short -- every time it reconnects, it opens MovieStudio again. When you connect your camcorder, do you hear the Windows "bong" to let you know it recognizes your new firewire device? If you're hearing that "bong" more than once, you've got a problem.

You can try removing and re-seating your firewire card inside your computer -- but first check out the cable. Can you use that cable with no problem on someone else's computer? If you borrow someone else's firewire cable, do you get the same problems? If so, it's a good chance the problem is in the firewire card or jack itself.
gogiants wrote on 3/18/2005, 2:17 PM
Don't know if this could be your problem, but I ran into a similar (same?) error message just last night. Turns out I had left my camcorder in "pass through mode" from when I was digitizing some old VCR tapes. I switched it back into "DV In" mode and I was fine.

My camcorder is a Canon, so no doubt the terminology and specifics will be different for your Sony. But, thought my experience might help you out.
RichMitt wrote on 7/7/2005, 4:35 PM
This is a follow-up to two series of posts from back in March, this one and "Print to Tape (camcorder) problems."

I gave up in frustration for a couple of months and then took the whole setup - computer, camcorder, cables, etc. to a computer shop. They concluded that my Windows XP was corrupted and they reinstalled Windows.

When I got the machine home, I tried to run my completed wedding project on Movie Studio 3.0. It ran all right, but it runs herky-jerky when I play it on the preview screen. It's like I'm only catching a portion of the frames. There are also skips in the audio track, especially on transitions.

In order to reinstall windows without losing the data files on my C-drive, they installed a new C-drive for Windows (and my other software) and re-named the old hard drive with the data files the F-drive. I originally had my Movie Studio files on the C-drive, as well as some still pictures and a music track. They are now on the same drive, but now it is called the F-drive.

All of the original video (avi) files were originally on a peripheral hard drive, and it was called the H-drive to begin with. When they added the new hard drive, they changed the designation of the peripheral H-drive drive to become my I-drive.

So when I first tried running the wedding project, I had quite a time finding all of the files in their new locations and getting them linked in again. When I saw how herky-jerky the Movie Studio project was running, I thought that perhaps the program was not able to access the files smoothly from their new locations. I was running the original copy of my Movie Studio project file, which was on the F-drive. Thinking this might be the problem, I copied it to the C-drive, but that didn't help.

Anyone have any clue as to why my project isn't running smoothly any more in Movie Studio? Or do I have to start all over again? By the way, after Windows was reinstalled, I had to reinstall Movie Studio as well, on the C-drive.
RichMitt wrote on 7/7/2005, 4:44 PM
I should mention also that I get the herky-jerky flow when I preview the individual video clips from the Media Pool. As best I recall, everything ran smoothly before I had Windows reinstalled. The only problem I was having then was getting Movie Studio to recognize my camcorder. Is this herky-jerky phenomena what is called "frame dropping?"