Recording directly to hard drive?

Xavion R wrote on 7/12/2006, 7:57 AM

What are the benefits of recording with Vegas 6 directly to your hard drive? At a training course at work the individuals recording the class
used Vegas 6 to capture directly to there laptop hard drive instead
of recording to the mini DV tape.

Are there any benefits recording this way?

Comments

David Jimerson wrote on 7/12/2006, 8:05 AM

It eliminates capture time. It eliminates dropouts, at least those related to tape.

However, you're on your own for scene detection -- that'll be a manual process.

Marco. wrote on 7/12/2006, 8:05 AM

I also sometimes do this. The two major benefits to me are:

- no need to capture tapes later (you'll save the capture time)
- no restriction to tape running times - a 250 GB harddrive gives me recording facilities for more than 15 hours of DV video!

Marco

JohnnyRoy wrote on 7/12/2006, 9:44 AM

Yea, if the class runs for several hours, hard drive recording is the way to go. No changing tapes means no missed action. Not to mention you don’t have to spend an equal number of hours capturing tape. If the class is 8 hrs, they would spend most of the next day capturing tapes! By recording directly to the hard drive you can gain an entire day of work back. (and that could be an enormous savings)

~jr

Xavion R wrote on 7/12/2006, 11:08 AM

How many hours of DV footage would I be able to record using
my laptop with a 50 gig hard drive?

I appreciate the input!

JackW wrote on 7/12/2006, 11:26 AM

DV avi video is about 13gb per hour.

Jack

vicmilt wrote on 7/12/2006, 11:30 AM

General rule of thumb is 13 gigs of DV per hour - you've got to do the math yourself (I flunked every math course ever).

If you are considering direct to HD recording, well I do it all the time in any studio or reasonably civilized situation, but...
I do it with DV Rack.

It's way better for that purpose than Vegas, since that's what it's designed to do.
You get a realtime DV video image on your laptop (not a misleading analog image) - what you see is what you get.
Plus, auto start of the camera (tape backup is STILL important) - waveform luminance scopes, audio scopes and recording - all manners of safety gidgets (sound pops, video level warnings, etc), instant access to recorded footage for playback, no transfer of video - and a bunch of other perqs which I forget but have come to rely on. Wouldn't consider shooting any other way in the studio.
Oh yeah... and it even has a "pre-record" feature which you can set.
So when you finally wake up and start shooting, there's already 30 seconds of the scene "pre-recorded".
No more missing, "And tonight's big winner is..." (CRAP - TURN ON THE CAMERA, FOOL)

John_Cline wrote on 7/12/2006, 12:01 PM

While we're on the subject of DV Rack. I haven't used it because there was a report some time ago that it would lose audio sync on long recordings. Is this true, and if so, is it still true? I make recordings that run anywhere from an hour to two hours in a single take. Has anyone made this long of a recording with DV Rack and did it work correctly?

John

mjroddy wrote on 7/12/2006, 12:38 PM

"However, you're on your own for scene detection -- that'll be a manual process."

I'm considering buying a Canon XL-H1 with attachedFS-4 80GB hard drive. Does this mean that when I record, hit start and stop, it doesn't generate new clips? that it will be one long clip?

Marco. wrote on 7/12/2006, 12:57 PM

"Does this mean that when I record, hit start and stop, it doesn't generate new clips? that it will be one long clip?"

From my experience with DV it looks like when you capture directly to a regular hard drive there is no data-code available. So you will have no scene detection when using VidCap. Only way to have automatically scene detection is using a tool like AVCutty which can use optical information instead of data code for recognizing scene changes.

Marco

Tinle wrote on 7/12/2006, 1:07 PM

"From my experience with DV it looks like when you capture directly to a regular hard drive there is no data-code available. So you will have no scene detection when using VidCap. Only way to have automatically scene detection is using a tool like AVCutty which can use optical information instead of data code for recognizing scene changes"

Scenalyzer captures live video without tape. I don't recall any data problems. [Its been a while though] An email to Andreas at Scenalyzer should get you an answer.

Marco. wrote on 7/12/2006, 1:23 PM

Ah, stop! I think I was completely wrong. The thing about live recording to hard drive is you cannot use the camera record buttom to start and stop recording but the capture utility itself. So in the end you'll get single files for each take anyway. So you don't need an automatic scene detection.

But in case you would need the data code for other purposes - at least when I captured to hard drives using VidCap the data code was lost.

Marco

Steve Mann wrote on 7/12/2006, 1:23 PM

I use Scenalyzer to record direct to disk, and yes Scenalyzer will break the stream into scenes.

I have even captured DV from three cameras simultaneously using Scenalyzer on my laptop.

Steve M.

Tom Pauncz wrote on 7/12/2006, 1:39 PM

John,
I recently recorded a dinner speaker for his DVD bio. I used DV Rack direct to HDD (AND tape as a precaution). You know - Murphy's Law.

I did not see any audio sync issues at all, though I must admit, I did hit F2 on DV Rack now and again to split the clips. I don't know if that would have made the difference compared to continuous recording over a long period. Also shot in a studio recently (some green screen work destined for Ultra 2) and collected some 30+ clips with no audio issues at all.

YMMV,
Tom

johnmeyer wrote on 7/13/2006, 12:00 AM

Use Scenalyzer. It will do everything you want (and more).

Scenalyzer

Scenalyzer Features