Comments

jetdv wrote on 2/17/2004, 8:58 AM
Yes. Canopus provides a means of capturing 3 streams at once. One firewire from an OHCI card, one firewire from the Canopus card, and one analog from the Canopus card. However, that card would be an EXPENSIVE addition - especially since Vegas won't see any of its real time features.
jducasse wrote on 2/17/2004, 9:02 AM
What's the name of the card? If you recall?
RBartlett wrote on 2/17/2004, 9:10 AM
( name of the card? perhaps that is DVStorm2)

NewTek VT also provides multiple DV inputs into a any-2-input-channel DVE switcher. DV has a latency on it, but each port would have the same latency and if your game is to capture, the DDR module is enough.

Call a dealer to demo this. Perhaps a faster than realtime transfer is another way to improve your workflow?
jetdv wrote on 2/17/2004, 9:44 AM
DV Storm 2 - a real-time card for Premiere. Of absolutely zero use to Vegas.
johnmeyer wrote on 2/17/2004, 9:52 AM
Another alternative that might solve the problem would be to use a second computer with an attached Firewire drive. I use a Maxtor One-Touch 250 Gbyte drive and it works perfectly with Vegas.

You can attach this drive to just about any computer: It captures just fine on my 450 MHz Windows 98 SE computer.

Once you capture, disconnect the drive from your "capture" computer, attach the drive to your editing machine, and away you go. You can edit simultaneously from both the video on the Firewire drive and also the video that you captured directly onto your editing computer's disks.

I think this would be much simpler than adding a bunch of expensive hardware.
jducasse wrote on 2/17/2004, 10:01 AM
I like how you think Johny. I think I'll go with this alternative, it does not exactly accomplish waht i want but It's certainly cheaper. I simply wish that i could use all 4 input from my firewire card and plug a camera in each and view them in the time line as 3 seperate video track.
johnmeyer wrote on 2/17/2004, 2:41 PM
I simply wish that i could use all 4 input from my firewire card and plug a camera in each and view them in the time line as 3 seperate video track.

Ah, that is a tough one. My Firewire drive idea won't help you with that as all. As previous posters pointed out, accomplishing what you stated above will be an expensive proposition.
RBartlett wrote on 2/17/2004, 3:52 PM
The NewTek VT card when using multiple DV inputs is essentially a dongle and pgm-out/preview device. The connection would be to a regular DV OHCI card.

To a lesser extent, the DVStorm2 would expand that singular input.
NewTek use a MainConcept hardware acquisition technique to overcome the directshow singular capture context. So I'd suspect more NLEs to offer multiple capture on a single PC. Especially with drives being so cheap/large/fast/ergonomic in multiples.

I'm not convinced that 3rd party hardware is of absolutely no use. Vegas itself uses a separate capture module. Importing files captured outside Vegas is no great task. I feel this is true for Std Def: DV, DVCPro50, D9, MJPEG, uncompressed and HD: MJEG, HDV and uncompressed aswell. Vegas deals with them all, with only uncompressed HD being a problem for my meagre PC.

A second hand PC capable of DV costs about the same price as a premium DVD player. ie peanuts. However a second concurrent license for Vegas isn't so economic, so you'd be looking at suffering with MS-DVapp or a free/cheaper DV acquisition tool. Not that this would pose a problem.

In conclusion: Microsoft WDM capture has a single video channel irrespective of how many sockets or even instances of OHCI card you have.

Laptop folks are trying to get NewTek to write the switcher, DDR and VT-Edit etc to work without the PCI card "dongle". This would be one particular application, multiple capture for other NLE convenience.

Vegas5 may rock to this tune?......