Newbie Q - DV editing

Hi

I'm new to the DV editing world, I'm familiar enough with PC's but I need a little help understanding something.

I have a Athlon 2400xp lots of disk space and memory, a Radeon 9500 Pro graphics card and a Canon MV500i and Ulead video studio 7 on Windows XP.

What exactly is acting as the video capture device? It all works but the quality is not what I hoped it would be, it's slightly jumpy and the the picture is slightly off.

The camera is connected via firewire to the motherboard and all my drivers are the latest ones. I had a pinnacle PCTV Pro in the PC at one point which showed similar symptoms when catpuring TV - like the frame rate isn't at full whack.

Any advice would be appreciated!



Thanks

[Brian110507]

Your video is captured by a combination of your firewire card and whichever software application you are running at the time, whichever you are using you need to set your 'project preferences' before you start capturing. If you have been using Ulead VideoStudio 7 to capture it is especially important that you check settings before you start capture as it has a habit of defaulting to NTSC you are presumably in a PAL area.

On Windows XP you should also have Microsoft MovieMaker - if you do not have version two you can obtain a FREE upgrade from the Microsoft website - you can then capture and edit using MMM2

If you would like more information about setting up Ulead VideoStudio then have a look at :-
http://www.jonesgroup.net/videostudiodvcaptureone.htm
remembering that you need to substitute PAL settings for NTSC.

If you'd like more about using MovieMaker 2 then have a look at http://www.papajohn.org

[MarkE19]

Capture of video is also very resorce hungry and will need plenty of spare memory and CPU time. Without these you are never going to be able to get rid of dropped frames. The good news is that there are several things you can do for free or cheaply to help to resolve this:

Stop all the background programs like antivirus etc & screensavers. If you check in task manager you will be surprised at just how many progs there are running on a supposidly idle PC. To stop them all I use a prog called EndItAll (do a search or PM me and I'll e-mail you a copy) that is a free download.

Make sure that your CD/DVD drives are connected on different IDE channel (different cable) to your HDD as the CD drives can slow a HDD down.

Make sure your HDD's are connected with a full spec EIDE cable and not the cheap cables designed for use by CD drives.

Make sure that you have DMA enable for any HDD's

Check all the above and if you still have problems let us know and we will try and give you some more advise.

Mark.

thanks Beejaycee and Mark,

Those novice step by step guides sorted it, now it runs smooth as the original, I did this before I saw Marks post so it appears my system can cope, thanks anyway.

I would like to know what was causing the jaggies and frame lag though! There was a number of likely suspect default settings, for anyone else here's what I reckon (i'm a noob though so no flames please )

DV type changed to type-1 (from type2)
Playback method - high quality (from good I think)
Resampling - best (from good)
preview to my large data drive
edit format to avi
Plug-in to Direct show

there were other options changed but if anyone else is trying I think one or all of the settings helped.

I SHOULD change them all back and do step by step, but it aint broke so....

Much appreciated for the help guys!

Also for anyones info, I was looking for the manual for the MV 500i
and it wasn't on Canons site (you can pay- it says??) - if anyone is looking for it you can find it on the australian site

Update

The Jaggies came back arrrgh (frame speed ok though)

Any ideas??

___

Edit: I fixed it