Topic: Dv-camera (Read 22 times)

gronne · « **on:** October 22, 2003, 10:26:00 AM »

I suppose this is a very stupid question, but here goes; If I have recorded some film on a DV, how do I transfer it to the PC? I thought you could use usb/firewire straight from the DV to the pc's usb/firewire ports, but since i don't have a DV here i can't tell whether it's even got such ports on it. And i figured that you can't get the video from the DV straight to the ports on your pc since i saw that you can buy PCI video-editing cards, which, as i understood it, transferred the video. Please tell me how stupid i am, because i need to know this fast as I'm making a film-project, and i'm noot to keen on buying expensive hardware if possible not to.

gainpresence · « **Reply #1 on:** October 22, 2003, 10:33:00 AM »

Some of your post is a little unclear, but I'll answer as best I can.

The DV Camera should have a Digital Out port (Which can be Firewire, USB, or both), you'll need to find out which it is, buy a cable (if your camera didn't come with one). And plug the small end into your camera, and the standard end into your computer (assuming you have the hardware to do it, IE: Firewire card or USB2 card if that's not built into your motherboard).

Those PCI capturing cards typically have both Firewire ports AND analog (Svideo, composite, etc..) ports, so you can either capture from a digital camera, or from an analog camera (or VCR, Xbox, ...).

Hope that helped.. In the end, though, the best info should be in the camera's manual

gronne · « **Reply #2 on:** October 23, 2003, 07:38:00 AM »

Yeah thanx, I guess that cleared it up a bit. Sorry if I gave you a vague or bad description. I'm really bad at explaining and I'm from Sweden so my English isn't what it's supposed to be.

Anyways, I checked the camera I'm about to use during my film-course, and i could see a firewire-port. I have got a port for firewire on my pc too. Does that mean I can transfer the video straight off to the pc, without having the need of buying one of those expensive video editing-cards? That was my general idea of how it was supposed to work, but when I saw that you could buy editing-cards I got confused. If you don't have a analog video-camera, why would you ever need to buy an editing card? Or maybe that's the only reason? Please tell me

gainpresence · « **Reply #3 on:** October 23, 2003, 09:34:00 AM »

Right, you'll just need to buy a cable (DV to Firewire) and hook it up to your PC.. Then use whatever software you like (Adobe Premiere, VirtualDub, Windows Movie Maker, etc..) to capture the video off of the camera.

Sometimes, those editing cards have MPEG chips on there that can convert the DV AVI files into MPEG2 on the fly, without using any major amounts of your CPU power. For the most part, though, it's fine to just capture to AVI (without a capture card), then edit what you want and convert later (takes more disk space than going directly to MPEG, though).

Author Topic: Dv-camera (Read 22 times)