Capturing Video from camcorder... Help!

strubbe · 01-15-2002, 05:52 PM

Hey guys, I have a Sony TRV-330, and it came with a USB cord to attach to my computer. My new HP 7955 has two fUSB ports on the front. I plug the camera into that, and have everything hooked up right. I go to my movie editing/capturing software, and they all say they can't find the video capture software... I've installed both of Sony's drivers, but it still wont work... I'm pretty sure the computer came with capturing stuff, but I don't know what's going on... Anyone know? Thanks. Oh yeah, I'm mostly using Pinnacle, and it's telling me to use the firewire (whatever number thing that is), but the cable is USB... Pinnacle wont let me switch to USB either for some reason...

bwp73 · 01-15-2002, 07:38 PM

I had a similar problem with my TRV-520. The first thing is that you're gonna want to use IEEE 1394, AKA-Firewire. It supports a faster transfer rate than USB. With that you will get better quality transfers. When I first got the camera I didn't have a firewire card at the time so I go and pick up this cheesy $20 deal that ended up not working. I ended up buying Pinnacle's Studio DV software that came with another card. After installing that and plugging everything together it was then seeing my camera. Another thing that you have to consider is the transfer rate over to the hard drive and the amount of space. If the drive that you're going to capture to cannot keep a sustained speed of 4mb a second then you're gonna have to look into getting one that can do the faster transfer rate. The second part of this is the size. In digital format video takes 3.6mb of space for second of video. With the Pinnacle software they do have "SmartCapture" that can be used. Using this will capture the video at Preview quality which uses less disk space.

So if you don't have a firewire card I suggest you looking into one. If you end up picking one up then you'll need the firewire cable for the camera which you can pick up here:
http://www.sonystyle.com/digitalimaging/A_iLink.shtml

strubbe · 01-15-2002, 07:56 PM

I'm glad I'm not the only one who has had this problem... What would you reccomend for a good firewire card? I have like 2 or 3 extra slots open in the back of my CPU, so I'm pretty sure it'll fit... Thanks again man, I really appreciate it. You helped more than Pinnacle has lol

bwp73 · 01-15-2002, 09:44 PM

If I were you I would look into buying the Pinnacle Studio DV setup. Comes with the firewire card and the full version of Studio DV 7. I think that at places like Best Buy it may retail for like $100.00. You can also search for it at www.pricewatch.com and probably find it cheaper. The software is pretty simple to use and was made with the average user in mind.

Chad0989 · 01-16-2002, 04:08 PM

Ive got the pinnacle kit aswell for my Sony DV camcorder. It works great but its a little on the pricey side (over $100 from Frys). You can purchase a cheaper firewire card with everything you need from www.newegg.com and it will work just fine. However, the software isnt as nice as the pinnacle software.