Capturing Video from Camcorder

MagNOT

Hi
Need help with video editing/capturing software.

I have been using Nero 7 to capture video from my camcorder. I'm not sure what format I should be capturing the video in ... my main use of the video will be to copy as DVD (usually weddings so need decent quality).

Options that I have from Nero are:
1) DVD (when I capture in this format, my old pc can't handle it and drops frames). Think this is MPEG2
2) Super Video CD?
3) DV (type1 or type2). When I used this, it captured ok but took absolutely ages to burn to DVD ... looks like I saved time on the capture but lost it on the burn phase.
4) Nero Digital(MPEG4). Within this there are options to configure the profile as Maximum Definition, Mobile, Portable, Standard , Cinema, HD TV, Maximum Definition - AVC .... same list again with - avc after each option. When I choose an option, the 'audio settings' tab changes automatically - eg standard gives LC AAC - 80 kbit/s, max definition gives 160.
5) Final Option is Custom. This is either MPEG 2 or AVI. Clicking AVI gives lots of options for video compression and Audio compression. Don't really know what I should be choosing here.

Basically, I bought the software assuming I'd be able to use it (and that my PC would be able to handle it). I don't think I was right on either count. Any help on this would be great ... any chance anyone out there knows this software? (any online manuals seem to be useless to me),

Linked query would be what I need from a hardware point of view to cover my requirements for video - would like to get a decent laptop but am nervous that I'll buy something that can't cope with video capturing properly and will drop frames like my current pc.

Cheers

8T8

The manual for Nero Vision 4 can be found on their site here. I'm fairly familiar with Nero though I haven't made use of the video capture aspect.

DV is the correct one to go for I would say but it sounds like your PC is not up to the job for (fast) re-encoding into MPEG-2 for a DVD (not the actual burning phase).

Nero Digital is an MPEG-4 codec that retains detail at lower bitrates vs MPEG-2 not much use to you as you would have to reconvert again to MPEG-2 for a DVD.

It sounds like the PC is the problem what sort of specifications does it have ?

MagNOT

Thanks for that - the PC is definitely not up to it. Having borrowed someone else's to capture a couple of wedding videos I found theirs much better. No frames dropped on capture at all using DVD capture or DV (why is it called DVD by the way ... I just used this assuming that was the one to go for given that I'd be writing DVDs)

My current spec is 1.8GHz Celeron with 256 GB Ram and a minute 40GB hard disk.

I'm thinking of upgrading to something like the following from Dell - what do you think? Is it powerful enough, am I missing anything that I should have (eg firewire capability ... how is this described in specs like this? is it IE 3394 or something like that? don't see it below which is worrying). How do PC/graphics cards fit into the equation here, if at all?

Cheers again for the assistance!


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8T8

The Celeron was a crappy CPU so definitely that was the cause.

That Dell system will do the job just great the Core 2 Duo is an excellent CPU for video encoding.

Firewire may be available as an option as you cycle though the extras in Dell order not entirely sure myself. It will show up as Firewire or IEE-1934 you can always buy a card to put into the PC that will give you Firewire support anyway.

kaizersoze

8T8 wrote:

The Celeron was a crappy CPU so definitely that was the cause.

That Dell system will do the job just great the Core 2 Duo is an excellent CPU for video encoding.

Firewire may be available as an option as you cycle though the extras in Dell order not entirely sure myself. It will show up as Firewire or IEE-1934 you can always buy a card to put into the PC that will give you Firewire support anyway.

That's a laptop he's thinking of buying. Firewire doesn't seem to be an option an most of the Dell laptops except maybe the high end ones. Personaly, if mobility wasn't a necessity, I'd go for a desktop for his kind of work.

MagNOT

Mobility really isn't much of a desire for me. I really just want to be able to do some video stuff a couple of times a month ... only reason I was thinking about laptop was that I'd like to have the ability to surf the web wathcing the box or in the garden. Someone suggesed to me that I should get a decent desktop and set it up as a server ... then buy a basic laptop just for internet surfing.

Seems a reasonable suggestion - what do you think? I thought to buy a decent laptop (that spec was €1580) for simplicity if it was able to cope with the video editing as I'm not sure a) how to go about the whole server idea (presume it's not that complicated) and b) where to get a decent basic laptop that can do what's required ... ie communicate properly with the desktop and not fall apart.

8T8

Whoops sorry forgot it was a laptop thats not a major biggie to overcome anyway as you can get Firewire expansion cards for notebooks as well.

Like this PCMCIA Firewire card for laptops.

Oh yeah as to the other question I missed in your follow up post as far as I understand (though I could be wrong chime in anyone if so) DV is better to work with if encoding into different formats e.g MPEG-2, MPEG-4 etc but if you are going straight to DVD anyway you may as well stick with that option.

You don't really need a server it seems a waste of money as;
* A laptop can surf the net wirelessly with a wireless router plugged into your broadband connection.
* The CPU is dual core which means it can handle many tasks at once so the system wont bog down while doing the video encoding.
* A server doesn't really give you anything in terms of the video encoding you seem to be doing, storage can easily be added via external hard drives.

zilog_jones

Assuming your camcorder uses miniDV or Digital 8 tapes, the video that it records onto the tape is DV. I don't know what Nero does exaclty, but software like Windows Movie Maker, DVIO and other firewire capturing software will just transfer the video directly to your PC, i.e. no quality is lost at all. However, as you have experienced, it is pretty high quality video (much better than MPEG-2 used on DVDs), so the files are quite big and it can be slow to work with on old PCs.

I'd highly recommend keeping it all in DV when capturing from your camcorder and when editing, and only convert it to MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 or whatever at the end. MPEG2/4 video is very hard in comparison to work with, and when editing you often end up having to re-encode parts or all of the video (depending on what software you're using), which will degrade picture quality.

And keep the tape or the DV video on your hard disk if you can, so you still have a decent quality backup.

SouperComputer

TBH, a 1.8 celeron is more than capable of doing video editing. Ive done it on an AMD K6-2 300Mhz with 64MB RAM.

It depends on the software/hardware you use and how you go about processing the video. The condition of your operating system has a bearing on peformance too. NERO may be trying to transcode the video "on the fly" to MPEG2 which is probably a bit more than your CPU can handle, although it "should" be able to do it.

Really what you want to do is transport the RAW DV stream to your computer, edit it with software (Avid have a free version of their excellent software) and then encode the edited video in the required format for your destination be it DVD, SVCD, VCD, Divx or whatever.

MagNOT

SouperComputer
When you say transport the RAW DV stream to your computer ...
- what one of the options that Nero is giving me will do this best ... #3?
- what does raw mean ... is it DV which if I'm right is a huge file type and much better quality than something like DVD
- DVD is MPEG2 right?? and that's what format is written to when I 'create a DVD' from my editing
- as a matter of interest ... MPEG1 = CD ??, MPEG4 = ?? (I notice that MPEG 4 is the format that my music files are stored in when I download from CD/Itunes). What's the difference between all the MPEGs
- Finally, 8T8 ... I looked at that online manual for Nero ... it's unfortunatley for me not that detailed. The capturing section doesn't list or describe what each of the various options below do for you which is disappointing. Thanks anyway for the idea.
- so confused, so many questions!

1) DVD (when I capture in this format, my old pc can't handle it and drops frames). Is this MPEG2?
2) Super Video CD?
3) DV (type1 or type2). When I used this, it captured ok but took absolutely ages to burn to DVD ... looks like I saved time on the capture but lost it on the burn phase.
4) Nero Digital(MPEG4). Within this there are options to configure the profile as Maximum Definition, Mobile, Portable, Standard , Cinema, HD TV, Maximum Definition - AVC .... same list again with - avc after each option. When I choose an option, the 'audio settings' tab changes automatically - eg standard gives LC AAC - 80 kbit/s, max definition gives 160.
5) Final Option is Custom. This is either MPEG 2 or AVI. Clicking AVI gives lots of options for video compression and Audio compression. Don't really know what I should be choosing here

zilog_jones

MagNOT wrote:

SouperComputer
When you say transport the RAW DV stream to your computer ...
- what one of the options that Nero is giving me will do this best ... #3?
- what does raw mean ... is it DV which if I'm right is a huge file type and much better quality than something like DVD

By "raw DV" he means the DV video taken directly from the camcorder, i.e. not edited/recompressed or anything. It will end up as an AVI file on your PC, and will be pretty large (about 200MB per second). This place might be of some help to you regarding DV video.

DVD is MPEG2 right??

Yes

What's the difference between all the MPEGs

MPEG1 video is used on Video CDs - pretty old and not used much these days. MPEG1 audio is still used for some purposes, e.g. MPEG1 Layer 3, or MP3.
MPEG2 video is improved on this and is used on DVDs, SVCDs (Super Video CDs, though at a lower resolution and bitrate than on DVDs), and most digital TV broadcasts (DVB).
MPEG4 is better again, and is used in DivX and XviD videos, some Blu-ray and HD-DVDs, and those crappy 3GP videos most phones do these days, among a lot of other things. There are several types of MPEG4 Audio - the most common being AAC (and there's several different types of that too) - LC-AAC which is what iTunes uses. MPEG-4 AVC is what Nero Digital mostly uses - you can play it easily enough on most PCs, though it may be harder to play it on other devices. There's many different forms of MPEG-4 video - tis quite confusing.

By "better", I mean technically they can give similar quality video at smaller file sizes than the previous formats (i.e. higher compression).

SouperComputer

By "raw DV" he means the DV video taken directly from the camcorder, i.e. not edited/recompressed or anything. It will end up as an AVI file on your PC, and will be pretty large (about 200MB per second). This place might be of some help to you regarding DV video.

I think you might be getting your B's and your b's mixed up. A 1hr DV should take up no more than 25GB of storage space.

magnot wrote:

When you say transport the RAW DV stream to your computer ...
- what one of the options that Nero is giving me will do this best ... #3?

To be honest magnot, I havn't used nero in a long time for video. Again, I would say try the free version of avid's software to edit your video. There is a tutorial here.

In any case, go with option 2 with nero. If it takes longer to encode the video, so be it. Generally the result will be better quality. Have a cup of tea, bang the wife, wash the dog or whatever keeps you occupied

TheDrunkenBrain

I wouldn't go with a laptop for video editing(although it would be adequate). The 5400rpm drive alone could antagonize any other bottlenecks such as a mobile cpu.
You should consider a desktop with the latest generation of gpu acceleration,(for the transcoding ati offer 'avivo' for x1x00 cards and nvidia offer purevideo (not quite so familiar with this). Anyway transcoding is going to be the single biggest time consumer and having dedicated hardware do it will greatly (i do mean greatly) increase the speed at which it's done. Again with the caveat regarding nvidia's purevideo tech, don't know that much about just assuming it's nvidia's answer to avivo. Not really what you were asking but it does and will relate to what your doing.
Anyway the best research is the research you do yourself, my five cents, google 'Avivo' and look to futureproofing.

zilog_jones

SouperComputer wrote:

I think you might be getting your B's and your b's mixed up. A 1hr DV should take up no more than 25GB of storage space.

No, I was getting my seconds and minutes mixed up , and my rough estimate was not including overhead. It should be about 36Mbit/s or 4.4MByte/s, or about 260MB a minute (not 200).

pedro ferio-vti

sorry to drag this one from the dead but I am looking to capture video as well, raw footage. However, a mini DV cable (4 pin) was not included with the camera so have to buy one.

I am wondering if this one is suitable?

zilog_jones

Assuming your PC has a 6-pin port and the camcorder has a 4-pin, then yes.

Slutmonkey57b

TheDrunkenBrain wrote:

I wouldn't go with a laptop for video editing(although it would be adequate). The 5400rpm drive alone could antagonize any other bottlenecks such as a mobile cpu.
You should consider a desktop with the latest generation of gpu acceleration,(for the transcoding ati offer 'avivo' for x1x00 cards and nvidia offer purevideo (not quite so familiar with this). Anyway transcoding is going to be the single biggest time consumer and having dedicated hardware do it will greatly (i do mean greatly) increase the speed at which it's done. Again with the caveat regarding nvidia's purevideo tech, don't know that much about just assuming it's nvidia's answer to avivo. Not really what you were asking but it does and will relate to what your doing.
Anyway the best research is the research you do yourself, my five cents, google 'Avivo' and look to futureproofing.

Neither Nvidia or ATI do media encoding on the GPU yet, which is what the OP is up to - avivo and purevideo are purely video decoding marchitectures. So, faster at watching movies, no faster at making them. An extra gig of ram is more use to him.