I have a JVC DV camcorder with firewire in/out. I have edited some videos on my PC (1.4GHz Athlon 512MB) and successfully created SVCDs. Since we have some relatives who can't play DVD/SVCD I thought to create VHS tapes by transferring via the camcorder - it should also give better quality than SVCD for archive.

Problem is that when I try to output the rendered DV file to the camcorder from either Ulead Studio 7 or Pinnacle 8 the tape starts-and-stops every second or so and the resulting video is awful.

It plays very smoothly on Media player so I doubt it's a rendering/machine bandwidth problem. When reading from the tape the motion is smooth and there seem to be no lost frames.

Any ideas what's going on?

Lampsh.

[MarkE19]

DV transfer takes huge amounts of a PC's resorces so.....

Stop ALL background programmes. I use a programme called EndItAll (do a search on Google etc.) and this does it all for you. This prog. is a free download
Make sure your screensaver/powersave are all disabled.
Defragment your Hard Drive.

You say you can capture OK, so I assume that you have DMA enable for your disk.
Also, why copy the file to a DV tape? Just use the camcorder as a DV to analogure converter. Saves a lot of stress on the camcorders heads.

Mark.

Thanks, Mark. I will also double-check that no other family members have stuff going in the background (It's the family computer so goodness only knows who's doing what on it elsewhere).

I'm not sure I understand what you mean about using the camcorder to convert D to A.

Lampsh.

[MarkE19]

Camcorder D>A

Connect the VCR to the camcorder by the AV lead.
Connect camcorder to PC by firewire
Put camcorder into VCR mode
Play back tape in VCR and set PC to firewire capture.

The video should pass from the VCR to cam to PC without a tape being used in cam.
To copy back to VCR just do the same but play from PC and record on VCR (now you probably guessed that bit ).

Check the manual of your cam for details on useing it as an A>D converter as there may be a setting for this in one of the menus.

Mark.

wOw. That's cunning. I have a slight problem with local geography doing that but will experiment.

Many thanks,

Lampsh.

Does one need a analogue in-out for that or is dv in-out enough?
Thanks!

Haven't tried this trick yet but all camcorders should have a "normal" Audio/video output to go to TV/VCR, which is inherently analogue.

[MarkE19]

AFAIK all camcorders that have DV-in will have analogue in.
Yes you would need analogue in to get the VCR captured onto the PC, and then DV-in to get it back to the VCR.

Mark.

Mark, I'm not sure that my JVC 357 (or whatever it is) _does_ have the ability to record analogue in through the standard AV port. I tried this as a possible alternative to a video capture card (I have some old 8mm analogue tapes I want to transfer to the PC to muck about with) but there was no success unless there's something subtle that I need to try. I even read the DV's manual and it only refers to the AV port as an ouptut.

Shame, because it would have been very cool to do it this way. Not to mention cheap.

Haven't tried vice-versa yet.

Thanks for your help,

Martin.

[Orbitalzone]

Originally posted by MarkE19
AFAIK all camcorders that have DV-in will have analogue in.
Yes you would need analogue in to get the VCR captured onto the PC, and then DV-in to get it back to the VCR.

Mark.

I don't think that's necessarily true... many DV in/out camcorders do have analogue input but many do not.

It's something you need to check carefully when purchasing a camcorder.

I can only echo this. On my ageing albeit still very good Sony TRV900 I always output like that to VCR - SVHS. However the analoque connections are output only.
Maybe that was because in those days the TRV900 was one of the very few that had both DV in/out....
It is also an excellent way to check the colour when you also connect a TV to the VCR...Gets quite a setup but worth it....

Cheers,

Jean-Paul