Re:Portable and cheap if you have a decent laptop
on
Cheap Tapeless DV Capture?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
If you can afford it, DV Rack is a great software solution for direct-to-disk capture. It has some neato tools to make sure you are getting the best picture you can. It also has this cool feature that constantly buffers video, so when you hit the record button on your camera, it actually records several seconds of video prior to pressing the button. Perfect for those times when something happens real fast and it takes you a second to react.
Every DV camera I have ever used outputs video to the firewire port whenever the camera is on. I don't believe it is common to find one that doesn't.
You can always capture directly into editing software too, but it is a little more cumbersome.
And when you use DVD instead of MiniDV your picture quality drops significantly. DV has a vastly superior picture to most MPEG-2 implementations. These cameras have to use single pass MPEG-2 encoding, at a maximum of 4-6 Mb/s. DV, though a different type of encoding that doesn't have some of the advanced motion analysis of MPEG-2, has a constant bitrate of 25 Mb/s, which is quite good. And it is better for editing with random seek and insert capability.
For the highest quality video, stay away from the DVD camcorders.
Slight correction to a common misconeption about MiniDV tape and the DV format:
There is no loss in quality going to LP recording mode compared to SP mode. It is still 25 Mb/sec.
Switching to LP you give up reliable insert editing, recording/playback compatibility with other cameras, and audio dubbing. And you are more likely to have dropouts. But aside from these things, SP and LP produce identical quality video.
And Digital-8 has the same quality as well. Same 25 MB/sec recording rate. The reason Digital 8 is perceived as an inferior format is because it appears on relatively lower quality cameras. You can dub DV digitally to a Digital 8 deck and you will end up with a perfect copy.
The mailing list for my company requires a user to fill out a form on the web site (and, yes, the intent of the form is clear; adding yourself to the mailing list is its only purpose). So they obviously want mail from my company. But this, of course, doesn't add me to their whitelist. People are generally lazy and don't bother to do it on their own, which leaves me to do it. I still have to manually fill out authorization forms every time I send out email (only 3-4 times per year). With the number of customers I have, the time required to do this adds up very quickly, and it can very easily eat up a day of my time.
I really wish these types of filters didn't exist -- from the perspective of a legitimate business trying to contact its customers they are a real nuisance, but I hate spam too, so I don't have a good solution. The email I send out is going to be important to my customers, but more and more I can't get through to them.
Because such mechanisms make it nigh impossible for legitimate companies to email their customers.
Each time I send out an email to my customers informing them of an upgrade to my software, I have to spend hours "authenticating" myself. It is REALLY annoying and a huge waste of time.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can afford it, DV Rack is a great software solution for direct-to-disk capture. It has some neato tools to make sure you are getting the best picture you can. It also has this cool feature that constantly buffers video, so when you hit the record button on your camera, it actually records several seconds of video prior to pressing the button. Perfect for those times when something happens real fast and it takes you a second to react.
Every DV camera I have ever used outputs video to the firewire port whenever the camera is on. I don't believe it is common to find one that doesn't.
You can always capture directly into editing software too, but it is a little more cumbersome.
And when you use DVD instead of MiniDV your picture quality drops significantly. DV has a vastly superior picture to most MPEG-2 implementations. These cameras have to use single pass MPEG-2 encoding, at a maximum of 4-6 Mb/s. DV, though a different type of encoding that doesn't have some of the advanced motion analysis of MPEG-2, has a constant bitrate of 25 Mb/s, which is quite good. And it is better for editing with random seek and insert capability.
For the highest quality video, stay away from the DVD camcorders.
Slight correction to a common misconeption about MiniDV tape and the DV format:
There is no loss in quality going to LP recording mode compared to SP mode. It is still 25 Mb/sec.
Switching to LP you give up reliable insert editing, recording/playback compatibility with other cameras, and audio dubbing. And you are more likely to have dropouts. But aside from these things, SP and LP produce identical quality video.
And Digital-8 has the same quality as well. Same 25 MB/sec recording rate. The reason Digital 8 is perceived as an inferior format is because it appears on relatively lower quality cameras. You can dub DV digitally to a Digital 8 deck and you will end up with a perfect copy.
The mailing list for my company requires a user to fill out a form on the web site (and, yes, the intent of the form is clear; adding yourself to the mailing list is its only purpose). So they obviously want mail from my company. But this, of course, doesn't add me to their whitelist. People are generally lazy and don't bother to do it on their own, which leaves me to do it. I still have to manually fill out authorization forms every time I send out email (only 3-4 times per year). With the number of customers I have, the time required to do this adds up very quickly, and it can very easily eat up a day of my time. I really wish these types of filters didn't exist -- from the perspective of a legitimate business trying to contact its customers they are a real nuisance, but I hate spam too, so I don't have a good solution. The email I send out is going to be important to my customers, but more and more I can't get through to them.
Because such mechanisms make it nigh impossible for legitimate companies to email their customers.
Each time I send out an email to my customers informing them of an upgrade to my software, I have to spend hours "authenticating" myself. It is REALLY annoying and a huge waste of time.