I have been taking videos of my 7.7 year old son for 7.7 years now and I have quite a bit. I would like to save all of this to hard drive or DVD but I'm not happy with the way it's working.

1. I am getting skipped frames when I record using PowerDirector. The program saves the video as a Mpeg. The video is just not that good and I can see the difference between watching the video directly from the camera Vs the Laptop.

2. If I use Windows Movie Maker I can't get it to save as a Mpeg and so I saved te video in it's original format DV which created a AVI file of about 225 MB per minute f video. Huge file but the video is great.

Questions:

Do I have to save as the AVI file to get a good video?

Would a hard drive Camcorder make this easier?

Does Power Director suck or is it my Laptop?

Laptop is a P4 2.0Ghz with 1 GB memory and is firewire.

Should I save as in DV format and convert later?

Thanks...

John

Absolutly...capture your DV and save it as .AVI. After you edit it, then you can encode it to Mpeg2 and burn it to a DVD. My computers never had enough horsepower to capture DV as Mpeg2 and it would only cause you editing problems if you do.

Dave

I have been using PowerDirector for some time now and I've always used the DV firewire input and saved countless videos and I never saw where I could save the file in a different format. In looking at the file properties of files I've saved it simply says it's a Mpeg. Does this mean the files I've saved have been a lessor quality?

I'm in the process now of taking a clip that is about 15 minutes or so saved to my hard drive as the original DV file as an AVI and converting it into a Mpeg2 from within Powerdirector. I found where it would let me take the file and convert it and it gave me many options from Mpeg1 to Mpeg 4 I think. It told me that Mpeg2 was HQ for DVD and so I picked Mpeg2. The process is taking some time and I'm surprised to see my P-4 2Ghz laptop so bogged down by this.

This is what my screen says:
File Type: Mpeg
COdec: Mpeg2
Video: 720x480
Frame rate: 29.970
bitrate 8000 Kbps
Audio bitrate:256 Kbps
Aspect ratio:4 : 3

John

If you want the best, simplest software to get the DV off of your camera, Google WinDV. It's a free tool which will pull the RAW DV footage from the tape, and wrap it in an AVI file. As an added bonus, it splits each clip into separate AVI file by analyzing the time stamps of each frame. (This can be disabled, if you want to capture one big file.)

If you want to do any re-compression of the AVI file, you're probably best off doing that after the capture anyway.

Keep in mind, that the raw DV footage runs about 13GB per hour... You need lots of HD space.

Again, this is the raw bits stored on the DV tape. Any perceived degradation in quality is a result of playback on the PC. (deinterlacing, scaling, etc.)

- Mike

Thanks Mike and I have figured out how to record from the camera to AVI onto the computer. Now I wish I could watch the AVI's on my Helios x5000 player and I wouldn't even convert it to anything but it won't.

I got another idea and that was to purchase a pinacle 710-USB which is a device that encodes to mpeg 1 or 2 by way of DV input or S3-video and then connects to your computer for control and dowload stream and saves to HD. Seemed like a decent idea but in HQ mode I loose nearly half the frames. Doesn't make sense since I'm not doing anything on the computer but downloading by usb-2.0 and saving it to the hard drive?

None of this computer stuff ever works right. This was just $150 and it could have solved so much but I guess it goes back.

John

Does the Helios play WMV9? If so, download Windows Media Encoder from Microsoft for Free, and give that a shot. I believe you can directly encode from the DV stream. If your computer can't keep up, just save the AVi's as you have already done, and transcode afterwards. If the WMV9's play well, that may be your best bet.

Try this, CLOSE every program (ie. ie, firefox, yahoo, msn messanger, aim, aol,limewire, adobe gama, ms Office, Adobe PDF preloader) EVERYTHING most folks have TONS of programs running after boot-up)

Close everything you dont need running, EVEN your virus software, you will be amazed how muhc systm resources all those programs use, this may help you.

Thanks for the reply and for the most part I've figured it all out by purchasing a HP560 HTPC. It has every input with with 3 gig of ram and it will record from anything and save in real time to mpeg2 HQ. I now can do other things while it records and never a dropped frame. It was a high price solution but my video is important. I also can record everything I want from the Directv tivo and archive it to my NAS drive. The 2 Ghz laptop was too slow for this and products like Pinacle USB capturing devices didn't work very well if at all.

Your recomendation is a good one and when I looked back to videos I downloaded and converted to mpeg in real time on my laptop a year ago I have dropped frames but not many. Now I get a bunch every so often like clockwork. I went in and shut everything down and watched my CPU usage and every 10-15 seconds the CPU usage would go up to 100 even though I wasn't doing anything or had a application running. I used msconfig and started shutting things down and in the end I never got rid of the usage and the laptop became unstable. I gave up on it and use the new machine for the video and it seems okay.

john

BTW, I would love to find the little bug in my computer, any ideas?

john