DV Capture From Camcorder Fails to Capture Video.

prevaljo

Member Joined: Oct 01, 2017 22:19 Messages: 105 Offline

Solved by

Oct 13, 2020 02:42

I have finally got around to installing a firewire card in my Win 10 desktop. Plugged the old Panasonic camcorder into the cable and Windows brought up PD19 as an option to capture the video. From PD19 you can control the camcorder, so far so good.

Steps taken to capture video:

1. Set "Automatic batch capture"

PD scans tape and displays thumbnails.

2. Set "Auto Merge" - I just want to transfer the tape contents to the desktop. The thumbnails representing short video clips are collected into groups (possibly based on date and time) under fewer thumbnails.

3. Set profile to H.264 - high quality, the tape isn't but why not. Alternative are Mpeg 2 and AVI.

4. Set "Start"
Camera replays the tape from the beginning and finishes, apparently normally, it takes time to transfer.

5. Click "Finished".

6. The Quickscan pop up shows 0 Intervals have been captured. There is no captured video data...

I haven't included a DXDIG.txt file because I don't actually get an error message. I suspect either I am doing something wrong or something fundamental is happening.


Filename	Screenshot 2020-10-13 193200.png	Download
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prevaljo

Member Joined: Oct 01, 2017 22:19 Messages: 105 Offline

Oct 13, 2020 03:18

OK, simple solution the video comes off the tape as an AVI file. Set the profile to AVI and away you go with fairly large files.

prevaljo

Member Joined: Oct 01, 2017 22:19 Messages: 105 Offline

Oct 18, 2020 02:30

I am many tapes through the task of copying tapes dating back to 2003 onto my hard drive. I have learnt a number of things:

1. Power Director 19, promises much but doesn't seem to handle frame errors (?), and it seems when they get to be too many, halts the import process. Which really means that it isn't usable for my DV tapes.

2. Power Director 19 identifies individual scenes during the first scan of a tape, (start and stop points when filming I guess). you can then merge these segments into a set of larger groups for inport. This useful, but overkill, a simple single file from the tape would be adequate.

3. WinDV imported all the tapes that PD19 rejected seamlessly, but each scene is an individual file resulting in a large number of files.

4. Adobe Premier Pro imported the tapes that PD19 rejected, as a single file per tape allowing me to repurpose the footage. In the video editor of my choice.

JL_JL

Senior Contributor Location: Arizona, USA Joined: Oct 01, 2006 20:01 Messages: 6091 Offline

Oct 18, 2020 10:05

Quote 3. WinDV imported all the tapes that PD19 rejected seamlessly, but each scene is an individual file resulting in a large number of files.

If I remember right, setting "Discontinuity threshold" to 0 will disable file splits.

Jeff

prevaljo

Member Joined: Oct 01, 2017 22:19 Messages: 105 Offline

Oct 18, 2020 14:15

Thanks,

The infamous documentation question, the answer to every question is there, but in the small print.