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for a Christmas gift to my 4 kids, I was faced with the same challenge. I had recorded 100's of 8mm both REG and HI8, Circa 1984, with a mix of recorders, including a first generation Kodak recorder. All I wanted to do was to digitize all of this media, and nothing more. I also wanted to preserve these with a secure strategy.
Here is my strategy.
1. first the process has to be easy, and somewhat automatic.
2. I wanted to write every tape to a separate DVD so as not to concentrate all of the output to a one or more hard drives. This way I would have a playable DVD for every tape.
3. I want to also create an electronic copy of every tape that can be played on a PC, Mp4, H264, etc. in single large files for each tape.
4. I want to give my kids (4) a complete set of all media.
So, I purchased a used Sony VRD-VC20 standalone Video Recorder, less than $100
(note this unit does not have Windows 7 drivers, so don't think it's usable much beyond what I am doing)
I also purchased a used Sony EV C100 Hi8 play deck, and a few head cleaners.
with these two items, I had a stand-alone DVD creator for every tape.
a 60 minute tape could be captured using HQ mode
a 90 minute tape could be captured using LP mode
since these were both 8 and HI8 formats, I really could not see much difference in the playable DVD.
So over a period of a month, I simply stuck a -R DVD into the recorder, hit play on a Tape, and voila, I created over 100' DVD's with little more that insert tape, hit record, hit play..
The process was so easy, the entire family can help watch the process and keep it going.
I then used PowerDirector 13, to import the video creating a single MPG file for every DVD.
On another PC, I used MagicISO to create a compressed universal format image copy of every DVD.. this way I our any kid could create a replacement DVD for each other as needed without the use of a tool other than Magic ISO or imageburn.
And finally, I purchase 4 1TB USB 3.0 portable hard drives $65, and have written the entire contents of all media, the MPG playable video, plus the DVD images, plus created a complete set of DVD's for my own firesafe, and one kid, and given each of four the portable drive containing over 600GB of video.
I'm now doing the same for over 150 tapes recorded on MiniDV format and the process is a bit different.
Adding a Firewire card to my system, I'm simply capturing the entire contents of every tape to a H.264 High Quality file.
I'm nearly done, and the process began on the 1st of December. Merry Christmas Kids.
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Great tips on managing projects that I will take to heart and begin to use...
On a more technical level regarding your PC environment, consider installing a free tool called Macrium Reflect.
I recommend you keep no data on the C:\ os disk partition, and use Reflect to create MIRROR, bit images of your OS partitions, you create a reflect recovery disk, and if your OS partition goes up in smoke, you can roll back the OS to a last reflect image. It's saved the bacon of many friends and clients. (The pro version is automatic)
Having more physical disks is a plus too, and improves performance, and keeping the reflect images on an Externally attached USB/Firewire disk is great too..
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I have the need to capture and create training videos for a software application. the output from the PC will be an HDMI port from an ATI Firepro V3750 at 1920 x1080. I assume the Video Card will not be creating any protected content media markings with HDPC.
I found this board,
http://www.startech.com/AV/Converters/Video/PCI-Express-HD-Video-Capture-Card-1080p-HDMI-DVI-VGA-Component~PEXHDCAP
And it says it supports 1920 x 1080, but I see no reference to WDM. I've submitted a question to the company, but thought I would ask the forums about there experiences when needing to capture HDMI Video from PC's for future editing.
Note the program we are creating the training on is video intensive, and a screen capture tool can't keep up. We figure an HDMI splitter and a dedicated PC with a card like this or something else is required. Audio can be added later... Thanks
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I'm helping create a series of video clips (sports) of a single player in a given sport that will be made available to college coach recruiters. I'm working with several hours worth of clips ranging from 30 seconds to a few minutes focused mainly on the player in question. At first I thought I could put the markers at the beginning and end of each segment and COPY / PASTE them to another video track.... Seems I don't understand how to do this.
Remember, there may be from 1 to 10 action shots of the player on any given segment of video.
Might I ask for some suggestions? Ultimately the plan is to have a handful of short collections of action shots suitable to share with college recruits... 30 seconds to 60 seconds....
Thanks
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It appears the effects in the highlight and cell slide show templates are contained in XML control files. Does anyone know if these were created by CL or a third party? I'd like to be able to better control the timing and perhaps the affects with these slideshows. A tool to maintain the xml files would the bomb. Thanks.
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I'll be in trouble if I get started, based on what you have you should let your experience level tell you when you need to improve performance. I'm reasonably new to PD, and was put in charge of creating some team videos. My system specs are similar, and my STOCK installation was adequate to do what was needed. I began tweaking and making changes, the single most important things I did to improve stability was to get the latest driver set for my FirePro V3750 Display Board. Keeping the system drivers up to date was equally important. And the number one thing I did to improve performance was add 3 additional SATA drives, and keep video on one, media on another, and output to the third. I also enable "Write Back Cache" with a UPS of course....
I wish I was more creative now...... :)
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I love DanielaJ's post.
FYI, I render a 4 minute video to h.264 1/2 is video footage from my Canon Vixia, and the other half are photos from my Canon Still Camera, all reduced in size, and using the frames slideshow template renders is about 30 seconds.
Perhaps what's needed is a "Benchmark" project all of us PD users can render and report the results.
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Preparing a Windows 7 machine to be virtualized on a VMWARE server addresses many of the optimization tweaks you would want to make for a machine using an NLE program. On page 18 of the attached document, they show the many tweaks to minimize the CPU impact a VM Windows 7 Machine would impose on the HOST OS. Doing the same on a physical machine has similar results. (REDUCES CPU OVERHEAD, Thus better performance)
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-View-OptimizationGuideWindows7-EN.pdf
Assuming you are running an AntiVirus program, you should also determine if you can have the local agent "NOT" scan certain file types and FOLDERS.
IF your PC is also running the Windows Firewall, as is the case if your machine is running on DSL and has the PUBLIC IP assigned via PPPOE. visit www.iptools.com in the upper right is the discovered WAN IP address.
IF your IP address is anything other than begins with 10.x.x.x, 172..., or 192.. then you are behind a firewall and really don't need Windows Firewall..
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Not all SSD's are created equal. I have several Intel Model # SSDSA2M040G2GC 40gb drives in my desk draw. These units simply don't have the write speed nor size needed for serious NLE.
Aside from my own personal favorite tweaks, some listd here, I've simply pointed the locations of various work and output files to other physical drives I have on my system.
(NOTE( if you are running an Intel Based ICH disk controller and the latest drivers, and you run your systems in a UPS, you might look and experiment to determine if you can enable "WRITE BACK CACHE" on the WORK drives in your system...
If you have lot's of RAM, you can also make a RAMDRIVE to output files too..
Here is one option to create a highspeed output disk in ram.. lmdisk
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/
Adding ram just to use this program is reason enough. Some ram drives will save the data through a reboot.
But having a fast outpout on a single disk box is nice.
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Moving the Windows Page File.
http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/53542-how-move-paging-file-another-physical-hdd-win7.html
Also consider tow registry hacks.
The following will DELETE the PAGE FILE ON REBOOT, rebuilding a contiguous PF on every restart.. PAge Files can become corrupt...
1.Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).
2.Change the data value of the ClearPageFileAtShutdown value in the following registry key to a value of 1:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
If the value does not exist, add the following value:
Value Name: ClearPageFileAtShutdown
Value Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 1
The following link will explain how to prevent Windows from Swapping the Kernel and associated components.
REsults will vary, and if you are running on low memory, 2GB might be the lower limit, then try this..
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/Q184419
It would be a plus if someone would put together a detailed listing of parameters and settings that PD uses to locate where it keeps all forms of data. Some years ago, and they are still available, we used Gigabyte I-RAM solid state memort cards using DDR ram and battery backups to have a 4GB SOLID STATE, (fast as crap) disk to use as a workspace for database servers, and these are still available and other solutions exist.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255
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Professionally I'm in the IT infrastructure managment business, and have been since 86. I've always enjoyed the fun side of PC's and have always tweaked the crap out of every machine I've personally used.
Never has tweaking, adjusting, keeping it clean, been so important than when doing video editing.
The link below is well worth reading..
http://videoguys.com/Guide/E/Videoguys+System+recommendations+for+Video+Editing/0x4aebb06ba071d2b6a2cd784ce243a6c6.aspx
Personally, if you are serious about video editing, you really need to consider good hardware, and clean operating system.
I can't recall how many times clients try and use a 6 year old system for newer advanced software..
For those that must use a home PC for more than video editing let me make a suggestion...
1. Try to have at least 2 hard drives in the system.
2. If you can, install a much larger hard drive, and purchase or find one of many PARTITION tools allowing you to BOOT from different partitions.
Reinstall the operating system on another partition, getting all of the latest drives and such from the vendor and microsoft.
Tweak the crap out of this installation..
turn off windows search,
disable system restore,
read up on FSUTIL and choose accordingly
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785435(WS.10).aspx
SATA drive makers often release new firmware for the drives to address issues,, check that out...
The goal is to Have the operating system running as perfectly as possible prior to ever installing something as complex as PD..
I would also strongly recommend that you have somthing like REVOINSTALLER running during the installation process... This will allow you to TRACK the entire installation and REVO will accurately and be able to FULLY uninstall the application. HINT - HINT, including many software packages that can detect multiple trial period installations. (Used for test purposes only)
Moving the PAGE file to a second DISK, recording video from another disk.. (the more the better)
KILLING unused Services is a good way to increase performance, and limit the number of things that can interfere with a system.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/2495-services-start-disable.html
If you've built your machine yourself, and are overclocking, you really need to do some BURN in testing..
a tool CPUBURN will raise the temperature of the CPU a LOT.....
I really recommend that you stress the heck of your system, as that is exactly what an NLE will do....
There are lots of free benchmark tools that can be used to stress your system....
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-free-benchmark-
programs/http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Benchmarks/IntelBurnTest.shtml
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In a previous post, I discuss the inability of PD10 to capture a video stream from a DV TAPE camera performing analog to digital conversions from and Older Hi8mm deck using S-Video and L/R Audio. PD 10 requires a tape to be in the 4mm DV camera. Booo.
I have several options, record in AVI using free tools like Movie Maker, record in Mpeg2 using free avs4you, but I would prefer the flexibility of PD10...
I would like to know what Video / media cards, perhaps with Tuner and Radio, with S-VIDEO inputs are users of PD happy with?
Cheers
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JL_JL,
You are correct. I submitted a very clearly written support request describing the issue, feature request, situation, or whatever you might wish to call it, and the first reply was completely off the mark. After describing the whatever once again, I recieved the standard boilerplate technical reply shown below. After which I summarized that PD cannot do this as closed the ticket, but asked that it be passed on the to product manager for consideration in a future fix or release. Don't get me wrong, I like PD, but now I have to go buy a capture software or and Svideo input card that PD might support... I'll post another request for help.
1. Let me know the Serial number. SR should be like "SR_No=XXXXXX_XX". Please follow the link given below to know how to find the serial number:
http://www.cyberlink.com/prog/support/cs/faq-content.do?id=1036
2. Exact steps which you followed to capture the Video and exactly where you see the issue. Also, send us the screenshot of the screen so that, we can look at the issue.
To take a screen shot, please press Print Screen key on your keyboard when this error comes. Then go to Start>programs>Accessories>Paint. Paste the screen capture there by pressing Ctrl+V or Alt+Edit+Paste. Save the file and send to us for analysis.
3. Details of your capturing device and the connection to computer.
4. Format of the Video captured by device and media (hard drive, DVD, DV, etc.) on which it is stored.
5. Try different device and check for the result.
6. Dxdiag.txt
DxDiag.txt: You can use the steps that follow to create this file:
a. Start --> All Programs --> Accessories -->Run OR Start-->Run...
b. Type in DXDIAG and press Enter or click OK, this will open the DirectX diagnostic tool.
c. Click on the Save All Information Button (save this file to your windows desktop and name it dxdiag).
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I have a well equipped workstation, and my camera is a Canon Vixia HFM31, recording at 1440 x 1080 in it's standard mode,
I had similar results on a fast moving scene, and if you want to exacerbate the issue, create a SLIDE show using the outer space template. H.264, and MPEG2 were the worst, so I tend to use MP4 compression.
Watching MPEG2 and H264 footage on a fast acting, high refresh monitor and card, it's more obvious than watching from a DVD and lower response digital TV...
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I agree, no one program can do it all, However, I reference this post http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/4543.page#26447
Seems the feature I reference was in PD Version 6, and was disabled or lost PD7. this was well noted in late 2008.
Version, 8, 9, and now 10 were good opportunities to address this issue. It's not that complicated of a basic feature considering that Microsoft and other tools easily provide the feature.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy with the results I am having, but a good software development company, and I've known many, these forums are the best places to develop feature request lists.
Having a FEATURE request forum might be nice too.
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As a paying client, I've submitted a technical support issue in this regard, specifically referencing more that one forum post. I'll advise as to the answer.
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Yes,
That was my answer, but I didn't like the large AVI files, so I found the following FREE recorder that gives me MPEG2 files...
http://www.avs4you.com/
They have a recorder that will capture the incoming stream without a tape...
I would definitely PREFER that PD10 add an option to disable TAPE check, so that I can record these older tapes passing through my DV TAPE using the ANALOG to DIGITAL converter. I would like to create a profile optimized for these older tape formats and not be so wasteful of space..
It's not like this is a new issue.. and the solution seems to be a simple FIX (CHECK BOX) Disable DVT TAPE CONTROLS
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The secret to upgrading follows..
Rule #1.
Purchase a newer faster hard drive than is currently in the machine, a 7200RPM is the minimum...
Rule #2.
review the listing of devices in the device manager and write it all down, you'll need to record the network card, sound card, graphics card, ...
Rule #3.
Visit the vendors site and determine what Windows 7 drivers are available... IF none are listed, that's not the end, the original maker of the chipset may have them.. Visit Intel.com and go to drivers and let it's analyzer take a peak and see if it recognizes the chipset and more...
The two single most drivers you want to have on a usb stick are the CHIPSET INF drivers and and the NETWORK CARD Drivers, with these you'll at least be able to download others...
You'll also want to download a windows executable BIOS upgrade file. I won't talk about the hard way...
Given that you can find some drivers for Windows, I'd go for it...
Rule#4 did you make a set of Windows 7 Installation DVD from your machine.. Nows a good time...
Install or have a friend install the new hard drive....and use your Windows 7 DVD to install a fresh copy of Windows 7 onto the new hard disk.. (THE OLD HARD DRIVE is you get out of JAIL free card) if all goes to %$^$^, simply reinstall the old one.
Assuming Window 7 installed, install the CHIPSET drivers, then the LAN card, Graphics, card,
If you have a newer Intel Chipset, a chipset that support Rapid restore, you should have also download the RAID drivers, and set the ATA settings to.....AHCI
Intel Board also like the AMT drivers,, and integrated graphicss.....
After installing Windows 7, disable the search service, disable the AERO interface, and search for a listing of services that can be disabled in windows 7..
If you've made it this far, I can assure you that Windows 7 will run better that Vista, and in most case faster than XP....
I've tweaked a few hundred installations of all of them, for work and pleasure...
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I've been uploading small version wmv files to my public drop box folder and sharing the dropbox with many users at once. The Menu structure of the final DVD is of little importance so simply sharing a shared dropbox file has worked extremely well, the fit nice on USB. A program called MAGICISO can mount a DVD image and run from ram....
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I will say, the contributors on the forum, and the support when properly followed has been very good. I had an issue, and despite being a well experienced Windows user, I had overlooked a later video driver than I had installed. Providing the diag files pointed me in the right direction. I do think my upgrade from V9PD to V10, (both 64bit), was more of a bug fix than feature upgrade. PD9 would appear to lock and freeze when moving around in the video... PD10 is not behaving in the same way as PD9, I wish I had waited 30 days, and it would have saved me $50.00
My System is an Intel WX58P Workstation Board, I7 960 Core Processor, 8GB ECC ram, A raid 1 Boot 500GB boot disk, and three independent 1TB disks. (WRITE CACHE ENABLED
Many W7 speeds tips are applied, many default services are disabled, all in an attempt to make this thing be a better than average NLE box. Move Swap files, disable search, no networking services, FSUTIL options, Diskperf N, disable...
My next edition will be a Iomega external NAS and plan to use ISCSI and Jumbo Frames and a Dual NIC add-in card for SPEED..
I do not run any Anti-Virus Software at all... All Web Surfing for fun is done in a Virtual Machine using Virtual Box..
I've recently done a few Soccer Club video, and intemixing music, videos, and slide shows, and the results are they want me to do it all again. opps.... Volunteer work..
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