One of the things I’m looking forward to about having a new computer that runs Windows XP and has some reasonable graphical horsepower is that I’ll be able to screw around with Windows Movie Maker. We took a bunch of video when we were in Hawaii getting married, and I’d like to play around a bit with some editing. WMM is convenient because it ships with the OS.
One of the problems I have, though, is that my camera (like all video cameras, I believe) only downloads video via FireWire. And the only IEEE 1394 port in the house is on my laptop, which runs Windows Server 2003, which doesn’t support WMM. After a bit of poking around, I found DVIO. It lets me stream video out of my camera to my laptop, where I can save it off to one of the machines where I can do some editing. It’s free and it seems to work. About the only issue I’ve seen with it is that it crashes when I stop streaming, but that doesn’t seem to affect the file.
I’m a complete newbie when it comes to video, so if anyone has any advice, I’d love it if you left a comment.
I just spent less than 20 pounds (about $30) on a generic PCI firewire card and it works perfectly. No reason not to have Firewire if you want it!
ReplyDeleteSome years ago I spent 20 times that on a Pinnacle card which became obsolete when I switched to XP. Frustrating.
Consider getting yourself a copy of Scenalyzer http://www.scenalyzer.com/ which is proabaly the best DV video capture capture program out -- costs $40. Main thing is that it splits video into seperate files based on the actual scenes (using the timecode on tape).
ReplyDeleteAnother alternative is to download the Sonic Foundry Vegas Video 4.0 (absolutely brilliant video editor) demo and use its vidcap40.exe program -- I'm pretty sure this will work without registration -- it's almost as good as Scenalyzer - but free.
Oh yea --and get yourself a FireWire card -- they're soooo cheap now!
ReplyDeleteI'm sensing a common theme here: might be time to pick up a FireWire card. ;)
ReplyDeletewell i want to copy video from my samsung camcorder to a cd..& i wish ths software would help.
ReplyDelete