Is my PC up to it?

[Gary D]

hi guys and gals,

this is my first post in here so please be nice. i've done a search but cant find the answer.

i've got a laptop at home (1.2 celeron 256mb RAM) i was wondering if anybody could tell me if its up to the standard required for video capture from my new Sony Mini DV camera. The video i've captured so far is a bit jerky so i was wondering if i added a Firewire card or a USB 2 card (or both) will the base system be up to it?

many thanks

gary

[Zef]

It should be, Im running a pentium III 866 (Desktop) and capture is fine. I am using a firewire card from a spare PCI slot. My laptop is a Pentium Mobile 1600 and Its not a problem.

Some other things that effect capture:

Try to capture on a spare hard disk if possible. You are pretty limited on your laptop, and i dont know if an external disk would help in this instance.

The biggest thing that helped my was to turn off the view window in your capture software, I used the camera window which frees up the PC to do the capture and not to show it on screen. Once I got all of the footage captured I could edit it quite easy.

The only problem is diskspace - make sure you have lots - I do a great deal of juggling !!!

[MarkE19]

The processor of your laptop should be 'enough' for capture/editing, but although the memory will run a lot of the editing programs it is very low and 512Mb is the recommended or even 1Gb if possible.
The chances are that you don't have enough disk space for capture though as DV will take 1Gb of space for every 4 minutes you capture. Thats a massive 14Gb per hour (a full DV tape). You then need more space once you start editing.
USB2.0 is not up to the specs required for full DV quality video capture, you need to do it via firewire.
I would also suggest that you connect the laptop to a monitor as with editing you will have many windows open and the laptop screen will almost certainly be too small to see them all.

Mark.

[Gary D]

thanks for the responses chaps. i'm going to buy a PCMCIA firewire/usb2 card for my laptop. and i've already got a USB2 80GB external drive sio i think i'll capture to that.


many thanks



Gary