Anyone Got A Digital Camcorder They Use With Their PC?

Hi Chaps,

I'm thinking about getting a Mini DV digital camcorder, but would like to hear the opinions of people I trust before going ahead. I was going to get another digital camera but to be honest given that the camera I was looking at is around £219 and the fact that I can get IMHO, a whole lot more for my money with a camcorder (Only £50 more for a very similar Carl Zeiss lens, tape mechanism, microphone, bigger screen, and ability to capture moving images and sound!!) I'm thing of going that way.

However on reading certain forums I think that figure could quite easily triple, due to inadequacies with my PC, apparently the following are true:

1) 60mins of DV takes up 13GB

2) An average render time for 60mins of footage (for DVD creation down to 4.7GB for example) can take anything up to 6 hours

3) It is best to strip your PC's background tasks down to such an extent that it is rendered unusable for anything other than rendering and capturing DV – essentially it's best to have a dedicated high end PC to deal with the task

4) Capturing data via Firewire is such a demanding task that if anything occurs to disrupt the data flow (even moving the mouse, or inadvertent system processes) the footage can be rendered useless with out of sync sound and/or video drop outs

5) A Firewire card is essential

All in all that's pretty intense stuff and I'm getting scared off back to digital stills until I can be arsed spending another £300+ getting my PC upto spec, my current PC spec that matters is P3 1GHz, 80GB 7200RPM HDD, No Firewire.

So my question is do any of you have a DV camcorder and what are your opinions/experiences of this stuff?

 

I have a DV camera and I also have Adobe Premiere Elements which cost me £50. The fireware card cost me £15 including the cable.

60 mins of DV does take up 13GB, but if you want to keep it you will compress it to MPEGII standard and perhaps store it on a DVD rather than a hard drive. Also its unlikely that you will want to store 60 mins of unedited content on your hard drive, much of the editing can be done straight from DV tape then fine edited once its on the hard drive.

The bad news is there is no way your PC is upto scratch, the PIIIs are good at encoding but not that great, I have a PIII 733 going for £30 on ebay with no bids, thats how old they are now.

I didn't think capturing the content was a demanding task, but certainly encoding it all to MPEGII standard is, even on a decent spec PC it can take time, unless you invest in an MPEGII encoding card which will cost you £1000, my university has these.

60 mins can take 6 hours? It took about 20 minutes at university, but they had all the fancy hardware. The longest DVD I have ever made on my home computer took about 30 minutes to encode.

Patience is required for little money you can make almost broadcast quality films.

 

RDD - whilst it's true that encoding large files takes a long time there's more than one way to skin a cat. Divide and conquer is the rule.

Plan your final production in short chapters and edit so that each chapter maintains a narrative. Render by chapter rather than the complete film. Depending on what your final output medium is going to be you can string the chapters together to make the final longer production.

I use DVD Movie Factory for compiling the final production. There's a useful free trial download of this software from the manufacturers website.

My experience in relation to your other questions:

1) 60mins of DV takes up 13GB
You'll shoot a lot of rubbish that won't even make it to the HD, so don't worry too much, and if the worst come to the worst big HDs are cheap so just add some extra capacity. BTW - it is recommended to have a separate HD for movie footage.

3) It is best to strip your PC's background tasks down to such an extent that it is rendered unusable for anything else
Nope. Just keep to the task of editing/rendering and you'll be fine.

4) Capturing data via Firewire is such a demanding task...
It is processor intensive, but not overly demanding. Switch off fax and email programs so that the won't be any interuptions. Also disable the screen saver whilst capturing/rendering.

BTW, many of the capture programs can split the incomming footage in to chapters (rushes) automatically for you. This is done by reading the start/stop points. With this feature enabled the worst that would happen is that one of the rushes would be corrupted. You can always recapture that sequence.


5) A Firewire card is essential.
Yep, but as AT has said, they're not expensive.

I first started PC editing about 4 years ago on an AMD Athlon 700 processor. I bought a Pyro DV1394 card which came complete with editing software. It worked well, I never got a single dropped frame. Perhaps this is because I've always run a second HD for storing the rushes and edited footage. I'd recommend you do the same.

Last year I changed the processor, MB and ram. It's now an AMD 2400 (?) with 1GB of ram. Still pretty basic spec. Rendering is much quicker including digital effects. You don't need to spend a fortune to get good results.

 

Thanks for the info guys, I see what you mean about splitting it down into segments Hex, it is something that had crossed my mind but I didn't know if it could be done. My main concern was having returned from a week's holiday with two 60min tapes full, and dumping 26GB of info onto my HDD to try and edit

So as I understand it all the footage from the tape must be captured in one single go (so you can't just start and stop the tape), but it can be split into chunks to edit later so it would mean maybe editing 3GB at a time. I could then leave the segments on the HDD and render them all together at the end to form a DVD – am I understanding that right?

Thanks for the heads up on the Firewire card, looks like I may have to get a USB/Firewire combo card as all my PCI slots are taken up. Also thanks for the “real world†info on rendering times AT, I thought they were waffling garbage when I read it, DV editing simply wouldn't have taken off in the consumer markets (i.e. “I want it nowâ€Â) if people had to wait overnight to get results!!

 

No,you've misunderstood. It can be captured in smaller chunks. You can always come back to a tape later and download the other rushes as you need them.

Yes. Or in reality, you'd rended each of the segments as a DVD compatible file and then leave them on your HD ready for them to be dumped to DVD. The final compilation part of the process is simply collecting the rendered segments, organising them into the correct order, deciding which still image to use for each chapter marker, then copying the whole lot to DVD. Since the rendering is already done this is a far less processor-intensive operation.

FYI Rendering is the process of creating a single playable file from a collection of rushes with instructions to add titles, effects and music. Once rendered, the result should be a complete playable file in whatever format you have chosen. The original rushes along with the background music tracks and all the instructions (the Edit Decision List) are no longer required. You could erase them from your HD.

 

Perfect - thanks for the clarification, I'm with you now

Also been looking through my Camcorder mag and found that VideoStudio 9 is quite a good overall modern package - so as a guideline I thought I'd take a look at the system requirements, not as scary as I thought actually (apart from the CPU - which is only recommended not minimum)....

http://www.ulead.com/vs/sysreq.htm

 

I use Adobe Premiere Elements, its probably the best you will ever get for less than £100 it features gamma keying etc (I.e the weather forcast effect) but its not easy to use so I would not recomend it for your first video editing application.

 

I use an earlier version of VideoStudio that came bundled with my Firewire card. VideoStudio is a great way to get into editing. There's enough functionality to be interesting and the learning curve isn't too steep. You can do fades and other fancy digital effects, mix music, background and a commentary track and then output back to the camera or make video files you can record onto DVD, VCD and a bunch of streaming formats for web distribution.

The other package that came with the card was Media Studio Pro This a lot more sophisticated, more like the functionality of the Sony Betacam Pro editing gear I was selling to TV studios many moons ago. If I was doing semi-pro work it would be worth spending the time learning it. I haven't used Adobe Premier, though I know it has a good reputation.

Hope that helps.

AT, can you cut to the beat with Premier?

 

Certainly you can do with the full version I haven't tried with the Elements I haven't had time to play with it fully yet and I have lost my fireware cable. But it this way it even the elememnts version came with a 300 page manual all in english Thats how complex and advanced this program is.

The main difference between the pro and elements version is the elements version has little support for hardware add ons such as MPEG II encoding and effects cards.