Comments

billynmi wrote on 3/4/2007, 4:58 PM
Since your Camcorder uses a hard drive , you need to treat it like any other hard drive. You transfer from the HDD on the cam to your hard drive in your computer , then you open VMS and import the files . It has been awhile since I did it but you may have to drag the files onto the time line or into your media pool. The video will be imported as MPEG. Hope this helps.

Billy
chapow1 wrote on 3/4/2007, 5:07 PM
Thanks for the advise. All I had to do is turn on the HDD camera while still in the cradle. At this point the computer recognizes it as a "removable disk" and asks me what I want Windows to do with it. Well, I chose "open folder to view files" which lists the individual videos taken. It's all drag & drop into VMS from there.

Thanks again!
MSmart wrote on 3/4/2007, 8:51 PM
Be careful if your dragging them to the timeline directly from the cam hard drive. If you delete them off of the cam, their gone forever. VMS just uses pointers to the file. If you want to keep your videos, move them to a PC hard drive then edit from there. I also suggest backing up the raw video files to a data DVD as well.
chapow1 wrote on 3/6/2007, 4:29 PM
MSmart ,

By a "data DVD" are you referring to a DVD-RAM? Are there other types of recordable DVD media that allow you to edit the content with VMS later on?
MSmart wrote on 3/7/2007, 2:44 PM
DVD-RAM, not exactly. If you have burning software, you can copy files to a DVD-R just like you do with CDs.

In my case, I use RecordNow 7.5 and add files to a data project then burn. If the files need to be restored to the HD, it's a simple drag and drop to copy back to the HD. If a video file is over 4.5 GB, RecordNow came with a backup utility called SimpleBackup which allows large files to span multiple DVDs.

Your PC may have come with similar software, if not, many choices out there.

At some point, after transfering files from the cam hard drive to the PC, your PC hard disk is going to fill up. One option is to add another hard drive to the computer. Regardless, though, you're going to want backups of the files. Putting them on DVDs is a good option.