miniDV to AVI quagmire for newbie « Videomaker Community Forums

MK Hammer
Member

Samsung mini DV Camcorder used for four hours of vacation video. Was great but not of late. Playback to TV now Black and white only. Important recording, must save.

Got used XP pro machine with 1.2gig Athlon processor MSI mobo. added IEEE 1394 PCI card and 1gig PC3200 ddr ram 400 mhz. Memory now totals 1.256 g. Windows Movie Maker captured onto new 1.2 Gig Western Digital external HD. Whoopee! At least I have it in color. Captured as .AVI

Trouble... video sharp except for "static, noise, pixle hash marks" don't know proper terms. I read that many of you experienced people run fast machines with 6, 8 or maybe more Gigs of Ram using sophisticated software. I just really want to get a pleasant one hour edited easy to watch DVD to one of my Very Old Dear and fragile friends who is on the tape... before her last breath.Â

I have also tried the Corel ULead video editing software that came with the card to no avail. It seems like I have some kind of buffering issue or throughput bottleneck or..what?

Questions:

1.Is this a hardware issue, a software issue, or just plain "tourist" trouble? I have read up for a couple of days and can only find similar sounding issues.Â

2. Is it likely that all of the data has been transferred to the drive and I just lack the necessary peripherals to translate it into clean output? Is there hope for future success, or will I need to take another four hours to capture it anew after researching saving for and building a whole new machine?

I sure appreciate the opportunity to learn here.

Posted 1 year ago #
SteveMann
Member

Your PC may be underpowered. You describe data dropouts which almost always come from something in the data chain is too slow for the flow of the DV data from the camera. Ideally you should be capturing video data to a separate drive. Also, look for Scenalyzer. It is a free program that just captures video from a DV camera, and it does it very well. It has a much smaller resource requirement than editing programs and it usually works where the capture function of editing programs fail. Once you have the avi file from Scenalyzer, you should have no problems using Ulead.

Steve Mann

Posted 1 year ago #
birdcat
Moderator

Since the footage is very important to you, you might want to consider having a professional just transfer it to a DVD for you. I know there are many such services (I have used Costco for Super 8 & 16mm film) but Walgreens and a host of local video pro's offer this. You could even have them capture for you to a portable HD if you want to edit.

Just a thought.

Bruce Paul
7Squared Productions
http://www.7squared.com

Posted 1 year ago #