Movies from SONY DCR-HC46 to CD/PC?

Question

Dear All,

I bought this Sony DCR-HC46 handycam. seems a good camera, with all good feathures.

But i am not sure on how to make CDS or copy movies from miniDV onto my pc.

I use Picture Package provided with handycam and have following queries, if somebody can halp me:

- While copying to cd direct from miniDV, it takes a long time and whole recording run in real time while transfering. Is there any faster way to do it?

- say, I have recorded movies of two diffrent occassions in a single tape (mninDV), and wish to make two diferent CDs of them. How can I do that? When I copy the tape on my pc it copies all. and if I use video capture, it makes AVI files but without sound, and those too of 2GB for 10 minutes each.

Please can someone advise me the best way to handle these recordings? I will be grateful.

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

As a miniDV based camcorder, real-time video transfer is as good as it gets. If you are not patient enough to do this, the other option is to get a hard drive or flash based camcorder - but while the video transfer process is faster, the trade-off is the video is much more compressed - resulting in reduced video quality.

You should be using Firewire (IEEE1394a, i.Link) to transfer from the DV port of the camcorder to the Firewire port of the computer - Not USB.

You do realize that you do not have to sit there and stare at the screen while it is importing, right? I usually go do something else... like check my email, read a couple of chapters of whatever book I am into, mow the lawn, answer Yahoo! questions... whatever...

Don't use Picture Package. Use MovieMaker. That way you can select which portion of the video will be edited and output as the finished project. There are many other much more powerful and useful video editors other than PicturePackage. This method will also allow you to use the video you captured.

As for the file size - I presume you mean DVD, not CD - standard definition DV from your HC46, will use about 14 gig per hour of imported video. This is another tradeoff of having the best available video quality (least amount of compression).