Thanks for help with video capture probs!

JavaNut wrote on 7/1/2002, 7:21 PM
Just a note to all those who helped me with my video capture problems. I thought I would provide a status. To this end there is both good and bad :-(

THE GOOD: I was able to verify that my system is capable of capturing perfect video using the firewire connection and VV3. In fact, my throughput is so good, that I can surf the internet, start and stop applications (Ms Word, DVD Complete etc) without even dropping a single frame! WOW!

THE BAD: It turns out that the video capture problems and out of sync problems with a Panasonic PV-DV710 are either due to the camera's implementation of firewire or Vegas Video not able to work properly with the camcorder's differences? Using other camcorders, I had no problems, there is just something about this particular camcorder that gives VV3 heartburn.

THE UGLY: As each vendor will claim "their product works just fine", not to mention this camcorder is not the newest kid on the block, the chances of me getting a fix for this is next to nil.

So, thanks to all for the suggestions. If anyone has experienced such problems or has a known working PV-DV710, please let me know. I will be happy to try anything, as my pocket book is too small to handle another prosumer DV camcorder (as I originally paid close to $3K when it came out...eeks!)

Signed

Sleepless in Denver

Comments

SonyDennis wrote on 7/1/2002, 9:48 PM
"deef" might have more accurate help, but I wonder if that camera would work better if you turned off "Enable DV device control" in the vidcap general preferences. This (in version 3.0c, at least, maybe before) prevents vidcap from asking for and looking at timecode from the device. Some devices (a hardware codec box that I'm aware of, at least), don't handle the timecode requests gracefully, and clog their communication buffers, causing dropped frames. It's worth trying, at least. If you do this, however, you won't be able to do batch re-capture, but if it works, at least you'll be able to capture with that device.
///d@
JavaNut wrote on 7/2/2002, 2:11 AM

I will give that a try!

By the way, I did a batch capture (using a camera that works!) with VV3 and then using the AVI file as a baseline, I converted to DVD MPEG using three different packages; VV3, TMPGEnc and DVD Complete (which uses MC) and tried to make the settings identical (as much as possible).

I then put two tracks of video in VV3; the original AVI and the MPEG-2 and did a subtract on the two tracks to see what changes were made in the MPEG-2 stream as compared to the AVI stream.

It turns out although each of the video qualities were similar in how the still frame details looked, the stabilization of the moving mpeg stream in VV3 was much better than the rest (DVD Complete came close, obviously using the same encoder, though probably not tweaked quite the same).

Just thought I would pass that on. (Though on hindsight, I should have opened a new thread)

Anyway, Kudos for that one! And once again, thanks for the help.


Regards

JavaNut