Importing footage?

Question

i'm importing footage from a camcorder through firewire, but it does it in realtime, i.e for every 10mins i wait only 10mins of footage is imported, can i speed this up? i have like 4 hours of footage!!??

Answer 1

The practised way of speeding up capture is to keep a log while shooting of the good takes, or watching back the rushes and making a log of the good bits, sometimes called a paper edit.

If its consumer footage for family use etc then its unlikely you've done either, there is an arguement for doing it, most camcorders have a facility where you can view the tape clock on the screen.

Apart from making the edit easier and re-acquainting yourself with the footage you will save a lot of capture time and a lot of hard disk space.  

By capturing short bursts of only the clips you need you will make it easier for the computer to handle the edit as well.

It is the trade off, miniDV quality is very high, there are lots of megabits flying around, so real-time capture is the only option, but the end result shall be so much better...

Good luck

Answer 2

No, I don't think there is a way to speed it up.

Answer 3

You can't speed up the capture itself but you can use SecenalyzerLive to produce a quick and dirty preview of the tape(s), from which you can select the footage you want to capture.  Bare in mind that 90% of your video is going to be either unnecessary or unusable, so why waste time capturing it?

Going via DVD is possibly the worst way to capture your video - you'll degrade the quality when you record to DVD, when you edit it and when you re-encode it.

Answer 4

That's the way it is with tape. The good news is that MiniDV tape is far higher quality than that of Hard Drive Video Cameras and the format that is transferred to your PC is easier to edit using Windows Movie Maker (for Example)

It's not just the Transfer that takes time, its the time it takes for the PC to convert it to the format you will use to edit. (Groan...)

The good news is, I have found a faster way, though it means you buy an extra bit of kit. (Works for me anyway)

I got a cheap DVD Recorder Phillips DVDR3380 for £70, use the firewire from the camera direct to the recorder. I recorder the bits I need and then finalise the disc.

The Disc goes into my PC and I edit as needed. (Though usually, the DVD I have made is all I need for Archive, the Tape gets saved too.)

The point with the Phillips is that I can do it while I am using the PC (No Slow Down) and leave it to record as I am doing other things.

Anyway, I hope that gives you something to think about.

MiniDV = Great Quality & Easy to Edit

HDCameras = Easy to Transfer, Lower Quality, Need Special Programs to edit.