MiniDV Capture Solved with IEEE1394 Legacy Driver

fkaMikeB

Senior Member Location: Ohio, USA Joined: Aug 09, 2014 23:22 Messages: 217 Offline

Solved by

Aug 12, 2014 13:06

Just an FYI if there are still any old school miniDV users out there that want to capture DV in PD12. I have an ancient Canon Ultura miniDV camcorder and a good size collection of old tapes that need to be captured. There's no Firewire port in my brand new PC so I had to first dig up an old firewire card from my basement and install it which went fine as Windows 7 installed the default IEEE 1394 driver. PD12 recognized that a "device" was connected but it was only showing glimpses of video and the device controls were not working properly. Pretty useless actually.

So, after some Google searching: I was able to solve the problem by "updating" to a different driver. Just find your Firewire card in device manager> click update driver> choose browse computer for software> pick from a list> select [1394 OHCI Compliant Host (Legacy)].

It does what I need it to do right now (so far, so good). It detects scenes and batch captures. I have not tried DV backup, but automatic and manual batch capture are all I need to do right now. When my SansDigital TowerRAID TR5M-B, 5-bay storage enclosure and hard drives arrive, I'll finally have the space I need for storing the captured video!

This topic may have already been covered, but I just thought I would share my experience on the off chance that someone else may need the DV capture capability in PD12.
Mike. Mike B.
|>>PowerSpecG311 PC(2014)<<||>>Windows®7Pro 64-bit OS<<|
|MB:AsRock FM2A88X Extreme6+|CPU:AMD A10-7850KQuad 3.7GHz|RAM:8GB DDR3|GPU:MSI Radeon™R7 250 1GD5OC|
|HDD:Toshiba DT01ACA100 1TB|HDD:WD Red 2TBx2|RAID:SansDigital TR5M+B 2TBx3|BD-R:LG BE14NU40 Ext|
|Camera:Canon Ultura miniDV|WebCam:Logitech C910|ADVC110 Analog/Digital Converter|
|PowerDirector12Ultra.2930|PhotoDirector5Ultra.5424|AudioDirector4Ultra.3522|Cyberlink MediaSuite10 OEM|

Dafydd B

Senior Contributor Joined: Aug 26, 2006 08:20 Messages: 11973 Offline

Aug 12, 2014 14:01

Hi fkaMikeB ,
Thanks for sharing. I bet you had to hunt for the firewire card.

I have a couple somewhere and a slot one for a laptop. Lucky you found yours.

Dafydd

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at Aug 12. 2014 14:02

fkaMikeB

Senior Member Location: Ohio, USA Joined: Aug 09, 2014 23:22 Messages: 217 Offline

Aug 14, 2014 23:07

Well, back to old school... I haven't done any editing in quite a long time, but about a decade ago I used ScenalyzerLive to capture DV with my Pinnacle DV500 capture card. Back then it was indispensable and it was the only 99.99% reliable way I was able to capture from analog and DV sources in Windows NT, 2000 and then XP. As convenient as the DV capture is in PD12, I have to say this old stand-alone capture software really can't be beat.

I'm pleasantly surprised that even though development of the ScenalyzerLive 4.0 software ended in 2006, it actually works without missing a beat in Windows 7 64-bit! I am truly amazed.

PD12 can do the basic scene recognition and capture to individual clips. ScenalyzerLive has so many more options including ability to rename files on the fly, split/combine files on the fly (during capture), index clips, export clip lists. I compared both methods with the same tape: PD12 has dropped frames and has split single clips that should not have been split. ScenalyzerLive was flawless, more efficient and much easier.

I guess there may be only a few people who would need this utility, but if so, it is free and is definitely worth a try.
Mike.

PS. I also have old Hi8 tapes to capture (if they are not hopelessly degraded). Will need to purchase analog to digital converter hardware, but ScenalyzerLive looks like it will be up to the job! Mike B.
|>>PowerSpecG311 PC(2014)<<||>>Windows®7Pro 64-bit OS<<|
|MB:AsRock FM2A88X Extreme6+|CPU:AMD A10-7850KQuad 3.7GHz|RAM:8GB DDR3|GPU:MSI Radeon™R7 250 1GD5OC|
|HDD:Toshiba DT01ACA100 1TB|HDD:WD Red 2TBx2|RAID:SansDigital TR5M+B 2TBx3|BD-R:LG BE14NU40 Ext|
|Camera:Canon Ultura miniDV|WebCam:Logitech C910|ADVC110 Analog/Digital Converter|
|PowerDirector12Ultra.2930|PhotoDirector5Ultra.5424|AudioDirector4Ultra.3522|Cyberlink MediaSuite10 OEM|

Dafydd B

Senior Contributor Joined: Aug 26, 2006 08:20 Messages: 11973 Offline

Aug 15, 2014 04:23

Quote: Well, back to old school... I haven't done any editing in quite a long time, but about a decade ago I used ScenalyzerLive to capture DV with my Pinnacle DV500 capture card. Back then it was indispensable and it was the only 99.99% reliable way I was able to capture from analog and DV sources in Windows NT, 2000 and then XP. As convenient as the DV capture is in PD12, I have to say this old stand-alone capture software really can't be beat.

I'm pleasantly surprised that even though development of the ScenalyzerLive 4.0 software ended in 2006, it actually works without missing a beat in Windows 7 64-bit! I am truly amazed.

PD12 can do the basic scene recognition and capture to individual clips. ScenalyzerLive has so many more options including ability to rename files on the fly, split/combine files on the fly (during capture), index clips, export clip lists. I compared both methods with the same tape: PD12 has dropped frames and has split single clips that should not have been split. ScenalyzerLive was flawless, more efficient and much easier.

I guess there may be only a few people who would need this utility, but if so, it is free and is definitely worth a try.
Mike.

PS. I also have old Hi8 tapes to capture (if they are not hopelessly degraded). Will need to purchase analog to digital converter hardware, but ScenalyzerLive looks like it will be up to the job!

Hi fkaMikeB,
I agree with you, SCLive knocked the pants off all the other miniDv capture software and was the one I used. A couple of things.
SCLive is now Freeware and as you stated stopped being updated some years ago (finally ended in November 2010) when HD came onto the consumer market. Andreas (SCLive developer), early on, made available a free analyzer for pre-captured avi's (VHS) with no time-code and was a scene change motion detection software -splitting the scenes quite well.
I used SCLive and it was fantastic at scene splitting video while capturing into separate clips, using the miniDV timecode.
Editors were a bit basic in the early days, PowerDirector 2 had just come out (I wrote a harsh review of its failings and such

and that led to a lot of update/changes with PowerDirector 2.5 coming out soon after) and couldn't scene split.
Dafydd

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at Aug 15. 2014 05:38

fkaMikeB

Senior Member Location: Ohio, USA Joined: Aug 09, 2014 23:22 Messages: 217 Offline

Aug 17, 2014 01:40

Cool, Dafydd.
Always interesting to read about past experiences and the early days of digital video editing. I'm totally new to PowerDirector and I am learning alot from this forum. My editing back then was mostly in Premiere.
Mike. Mike B.
|>>PowerSpecG311 PC(2014)<<||>>Windows®7Pro 64-bit OS<<|
|MB:AsRock FM2A88X Extreme6+|CPU:AMD A10-7850KQuad 3.7GHz|RAM:8GB DDR3|GPU:MSI Radeon™R7 250 1GD5OC|
|HDD:Toshiba DT01ACA100 1TB|HDD:WD Red 2TBx2|RAID:SansDigital TR5M+B 2TBx3|BD-R:LG BE14NU40 Ext|
|Camera:Canon Ultura miniDV|WebCam:Logitech C910|ADVC110 Analog/Digital Converter|
|PowerDirector12Ultra.2930|PhotoDirector5Ultra.5424|AudioDirector4Ultra.3522|Cyberlink MediaSuite10 OEM|