Video Capture Newbie Help Please

[Huggy]

I would like to backup all my Mini DV tapes to my Hard Drive, and would appreciate some advice please.

My motherboard does not have firewire, so I have already ordered a PCIE firewire internal card. Probably should have checked with you guys first.

My camcorder is an old, but very usable, Sharp VLSD20. It has a 4 pin firewire cable. However, I have another firewire cable with a 4 pin and a 6 pin port. So I figure I should be able to connect the 4 pin to the camcorder and the 6 pin to the internal firewire card. Correct?

I am assuming that Windows Movie Maker will carry out the video capture.

Now, I did a trial run today with my company laptop (runs XP Pro), and it was a bit of a mess frankly. I connected to the 4 pin firewire port, and the camcorder was recognised, the system suggested Movie Maker, but I had repeated failures getting Movie Maker to run. Error messages such as "The video device cannot be used at this time because there has been an error when starting the device" and "a video capture device was not detected..."

I then tried a freeware program called Video Caster. This was marginally better in that I eventually got it capture the video, but with what I consider to be very poor quality results. It has a number of quality options ranging from "low bandwidth streaming" which runs at 10FPS with 320*240 resolution, through to "Desktop Viewing" which runs at 29 FPS and with the same resolution as the DV. The former is too blurry, and the latter is too jerky, and nowhere as good quality as the original tape.

Very disapponted with the trial, and I'm wondering how to improve matters.

Help?

[jaymac]

You may find Win Dv also free is a good substitute though WMM should work You do appreciate each hour of tape is going to be around 13G/bte .Also when connecting everything should be Off then PC on then Cam with playback selected .I'm sure more deatailed advice will be added

[MarkE19]

have a look at PapaJohn.org for detailed help with Movie Maker.
Make sure you set it to capture as DV .AVI files rather than the lower quality (and highly compressed) .WMV format that will probably be selected by default. As stated though .AVI files will eat up around 13Gb per hour of footage, so plenty of HDD space is required.
Jerky capture can be caused by low HDD space, fragmented HDD, capture of PAL footage with NTSC settings (or vice versa).

Mark.

[Huggy]

Thanks for the replies. Will check the link.

There is plenty of space on the laptop. And the HTPC has a new Hard drive. 1 TB. Will suffice for the time being