Audio & video software forum: Easiest way to transfer MiniDV footage to PC and edit it

"Hi. I have a desktop, which is more than six years old, running Windows XP Professional with the latest service packs. I also have a six-month-old laptop running Vista Home Premium, with 2GB RAM and a 200GB HD. I know the laptop is the better choice for this, but I am still fumbling on how to get this done."

Put a good DVD Burner on the desktop and add a large HDD for storage, RAM if you need it. Now all you need is The USB connection from the camera to the computer so you can transfer the movie files, and a good editing program to edit your movies. There a number of good editing programs available like VideoStudio 11 or Pinnacle or any number of others.

This is just personal: I hate Vista. I have upgraded numerous machines for friends and family from Vista to WinXP Pro. I have a friend who has his own computer business and retail site, he teaches computer stuff to others and does computer repairs and upgrading in half of Oklahoma, and he switched his machines over from Vista to XP Pro, also. If it were mine, I'd do the same to your laptop and have a much better machine. Again, that's just personal stuff.

Alex, the thing you have not told us is whether or not either one of your computers has a Firewire port to connect the camcorder to. This is the only way to transfer digital video from a MiniDV camera to your computer for editing. This has to be a factory built in option on your laptop. On the desktop PC you can buy a card for about $30 to $40 to add the capability. Oh - note that Firewire is also called IEEE-1394, and iLink by Sony.
Assuming you have the right connection, Windows XP includes "Windows Movie Maker" which is very basic editing software, and I am sure Vista includes something similar. Other low cost editing programs are available, but all will work in a similar manner. You will copy video from the camcorder to the camera, ending up with multiple video clips that you then edit into your finished "movie".
The big issue for you will be that it takes 1 hour to copy 1 hour of video to the computer, AND each hour of MiniDV footage will take 13GB of hard drive space.
Due to the size of the footage, even a single MiniDV tape would take 3 DVD-R or DVD+/-RW discs to store! Once you "encode" the video to a DVD, its no longer in an editable format unfortunately. The DVD encoding process to produce a 2 hour video DVD on that 4.7GB DVD-R disc is lossy, and the video has to be extracted, again very time consuming, if you want to ever do anything with it again - and that is at a loss of quality.
Your long term best bet is to purchase a large hard drive - I use a firewire hard drive that I can daisy chain with my camcorder, and I use it for most of the video capture and editing. This way you do not fill up your main hard drive with video. (Note that most USB drives will not sustain the throughput to capture video - firewire can). Edit and work on your projects, and when finished, burn your finished DVD, and then delete the big 13GB worth of raw footage. If you ever need it again, you can get it from the original tape.
I hope all this helps. Good luck!

Jim

"This has to be a factory built in option on your laptop."

If your laptop has a PCMCIA port (as most laptops I've seen in the last decade), you can add firewire. It costs a bit more than it does to add a card to a desktop but it is certainly "doable".

i think that,,,, the easiest way to transfer the dv ,have to use the ULEAD VIDIODSTUDIO EDITOR and follow the instructions, but it takes longtime.

Like, how?
It's not a separate program. It's part of XP professional.

Good Link.

It is part of Windows XP Home, W/ SP2.
It's in the SP2 Update, it CAN also be downloaded seperately.

Movie Maker 2.1 is available for download with Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).
You can also download SP2 and Movie Maker 2.1 from Microsoft Update. If you cannot use Automatic Updates or download SP2 via Windows Update, order a CD.

I can use the program(Multimedia Navigator)that the JVC came with to do what I thought was transferring and editing, but I can't use Win Movie Maker because my comp doesn't detect the camcorder.
Suggestions?

I took a wedding video on my Sony MiniDV, during the first dance of the Bride and Groom (It was a waltz) I turned the camera to get a full length video, then turned it back, now you have to turn the moniter during the video to see that portion correctly. When I experimented with editing ( I didn't get too far, but I bought the Adobe Premier Elements, Pinnacle Studio Media Suite10.5, Sony Vegas Movie Studio, and My Book external hard drive.)I was able to turn a frame sideways and there was a black area and it was a different proportionally from the other frames. I never succeeded in getting it edited. I tried for a month, I quit and plan to try again. Someone told me you are not suppose to turn the camera and the MiniDV movies are not made to edit. Can the rotation of the frames be successfully edited into the video and burned onto a DVD?

Alex,

This is fairly straightforward, actually. And while you have mini-DV, it really wouldn't matter what format of camcorder you had as long as we were talking about a digital camcorder (coming from an analog camcorder is different and requires some different hardware).

Most digital camcorders have a Firewire (sometimes known as IEEE 1394) interface. Most modern computers, especially laptops, also have a Firewire interface. If not, your first task is to get a Firewire interface for the target computer. If necessary, this is an independent task that is not directly related to the video task. You may also need to get a suitable cable (4-pin, 6-pin or possibly 6-pin on one end to 4-pin on the other).

[Some camcorders will have USB interfaces instead of or in addition to a Firewire interface. If so, fine, but in many cases the image quality from the USB interface (if there is one) will be inferior to that from the Firewire interface.]

You will probably next need to install Windows drivers for your camcorder on your PC, so that the camcorder will be recognized by the PC when they are connected. The drivers should have come with the Camcorder, or should be available on the web site of the camcorder manufacturer.

Finally, you will need to install some video editing software that can capture the video from the camcorder and also allow you do some editing. To some extent, this depends on the video format that comes out of the camcorder ... it may be Uncompressed AVI (actually the best format for editing in SOME ways, but the files are HUGE (more than 10 GIGABYTES per hour), it may be MPEG or it may be MPEG2. In a few cases, it may be yet something else. The video software has to be able to deal with the file format that is output by the camcorder. It's likely that most video software will work with most camcorders, but it's something to be aware of as in some cases it may limit your choice of software. Again, it's very possible that such software came with the camcorder. You can also use Microsoft Windows Movie Maker, or you can buy a product like Pinacle Studio that has this capability. Another thing to note for the burning step (below) is that the full retail versions of the two major CD & DVD burning programs (Roxio (now Sonic) Easy Media Creator and Nero) both have all the software that you will need in most cases, but in neither case is their editing software necessarily the best available.

Whatever software you select, this software will need to let you get the video from the camcorder and save it on the PC as a file (the file size will be large, gigabytes per hour probably and in some cases tens of giabytes per hour). That completes the first step.

The next step is to edit the video into your desired content. This is entirely a function of the video editing software that you use. Simple software (Windows Movie Maker) can do cut and paste; more complex software can do eleaborate video production with multiple video streams being merged, often with "chroma key" (blue or green screen used to put part of one video stream (often a person) "into" another video stream). There are a lot of choices here, with a wide range of cost and a wide range of ease of use.

Finally, you need to do DVD authoring, which is where you will (if you want to) create "menus" and "chapters" for putting the video onto a DVD. Some of the major editing software packages (Pinacle) have both the video editing and the DVD authoring functions built-in, while in other cases you will use one program for video editing, and another program for DVD authoring. For example, Windows Movie Maker, which has reasonable cut-and-paste video editing, does not, by itself, have the DVD authoring capability. But Pinacle, and the Roxio and Nero products, do have both editing and DVD authoring. The final step of DVD authoring will actually write the DVD from the video. Note that if the video has to be re-encoded into MPEG2 (very likely) this step can take a LONG time (hours; on some computers, more than 12 hours for a one- or two-hour video).

I hope that gives you an overview of the process and what is involved. Look for some user reviews of the available software packages. In general, there is a very large trade-off between capabilities and ease-of-use, but most people are only looking for simple "cut-and-paste" editing and not for the capabilities that would in used by commercial video production applications.

By the way, do NOT use DVD-RW media. I don't recommend RW media (either CD or DVD) for ANYTHING. It is not a good archival media and precisely because such media is not "permanent", sometimes data written to such media "fades" over time (I will accept both that it should not happen, and that if it does, it's because the hardware was defective ... that doesn't matter ... it DOES happen, too often). On top of the RW media is slow to burn and expensive. With CD media at about a penny per disc and DVD media at about 20 cents per disc, just use one-time media, and if you want to redo the project, use a new media. It's cheap enough that the cost just shouldn't be an issue, and it's faster (a lot faster), cheaper and more reliable and permanent than RW media.

Before the editing and DVD burning process has been completed, I simply delete the file?

Quote "[Some camcorders will have USB interfaces instead of or in addition to a Firewire interface. If so, fine, but in many cases the image quality from the USB interface (if there is one) will be inferior to that from the Firewire interface.]"

That comment is Just Not True...................Particularly now that most modern USB connections are USB2 !!

True, 1's and 0's are 1's and 0's. BUT, with my older JVC Mini-DV camera, the only way to utilize the USB interface is utilizing the software that came with the camera. When you do so, you you get hugely compressed files (AVI's if I remember right) in a resolution that's along the lines of 320X240. So, in this way, yes the USB becomes inferior. Perhaps something like that is what the original poster of that response was referring to.

I noted you had some "older" pc equipment; just a caution that Pinnacle is not very compatible. I use it all the time and also highly recommend it, but my current version 9.4.3 cannot be upgraded. I tried 10.5 and 11 and neither would install correctly. It is common advice for Pinnacle users to attempt installation many times, which I did, & still no luck. My pc is an Intel Celeron 2.93GHz/WinXP-SP3. Also note that this software goes on some really awesome sales with rebates.
Finally, a general tip if you are going to burn the whole tape to DVD; use scene detection, it will be way easier to import only the files you want into an editor.

I have an early version of Pinnacle (8.12) and wonder how you deal with the following situation:
I captured a video from my camcorder and in the Edit mode I moved the video scenes to the story board - after moving all the video clips I then wanted to add some photos - to my disappointment I was only able to include 1/3 of the photos I wanted. The story board windows or whatever they are called were all filled (total of 27)and I could not determine a way to add more story board windows or more photos.

What am I not doing correctly?

Thanks for any insights,

Frank