Capturing Woes

[Marjoline]

I am an avid concert filmer. Filming the video is the easy part. Then it would be so nice to supply the recorded band fast with the video for their site. But then the capturing woes begin, unless you are a nice stable person who always uses the same computer, which never breaks down. If you need to suddenly move to a friends computer whilst yours is in hospital or because you are staying away from home, anything can happen. Currently the only thing that would work for me, video AND soundwise, is the MotionDV Studio software which came with my Panasonic NV-GS500. But it won't even install on my borrowed state-of-the-art Vista computer. I tried my AVS video-editing stuff, but when I playback the sound is sick-sick-sick. Then I tried Windows Moviemaker, which stopped after about 1/4 hr because it said with FAT32 files it couldn't record more than 4 Gb. I am capturing to AVI, so it needs heaps of Gb's. And I have never earlier had this limitation message, maybe it is a Vista bug. And there, the sound was absolutely fine! I have also had the sick sound problems from the Adobe Première CS3. Must be some sort of codecs problem lurking in the background. My camera is about 1,5 years old though, so it shouldn't pose any codecs problems. Any advice for me that is simple, free, AVI, with good sound, and works on Vista, to simply capture video as well as good sound? Once I have it in the machine, I have all I need for the editing, no problem there.

[glesgaguyav]

First, there are some programs that are not compatible with Vista but have you tried installing it in "compatibity mode"? if I remember rightly, right click the setup icon and select "properties" then you will see the compatability mode tab. Also it sometimes helps if you change the Vista desktop to XP.

If your HD has been formatted as FAT32 then your files will be limited in size, you would need to reformat the drive to NTSF, you should ideally have a separate HD for video capture formatted as NTSF, this would save you having to re format your HD.

[MarkE19]

And if you are looking to be able to use several different PC's for capture & editing you will need to buy a copy of the software for each PC. Any paid for program can only be installed on 1 PC at a time.
There are not many free editing programs, other than Movie Maker. If you want to use several PC's then this may be your best bet to learn and use. Have a look Here for losts of help and advice on using it.

Mark.

[redsox_mark]

Originally Posted by MarkE19

And if you are looking to be able to use several different PC's for capture & editing you will need to buy a copy of the software for each PC. Any paid for program can only be installed on 1 PC at a time.

It depends on the software and their licensing agreement. For Sony Media Software (e.g. Vegas), their policy is:

"Our licensing agreement permits you to install the software on as many machines as you own, as long as you are not running the programs at the same time"

Though it does say you should own the PCs.

[Mr Lazy]

You could try WinDV or VirtualDubMod to capture the DV into an AVI. VirtualDubMod can split the captured video into files of 2GB (though I've never tried this feature).
You could use GSpot to see if there is an audio codec problem.
These are free and I have used them on Vista without problems.

Either way you need to get round the 4GB per file limit with the FAT32 file system - if you don't want to backup and re-format to NTFS then you could always buy a cheap external hard drive and format it to NTFS.
Do you really need to capture DV-AVI? Last resort you could try WMV in Movie Maker which in my experience can show pixelation (though this may vary depending on the power of the computer).

[Mr Lazy]

Originally Posted by redsox_mark

It depends on the software and their licensing agreement. For Sony Media Software (e.g. Vegas), their policy is:

"Our licensing agreement permits you to install the software on as many machines as you own, as long as you are not running the programs at the same time"

Really? That's plain daft. As if anyone's not going to do that just in case Sony find out (which they wont)!