HDV capturing question
 

Forgive my ignorance, I'm new to the world of HD. My camera crew that I contract out has HDV cameras. I need to capture the footage into my computer. It would be nice if he didn't have to drive all the way out to the office (he lives about 45 minutes away) just to bring his camera and capture it. He'd never let us borrow the camera to capture it off there. Is there a cheap way to capture it off the tapes? Can you capture it off a cheap SD mini-DV camcorder? Would there be a difference?

What's the best way to go about this? I'd suggest he capture it onto an external harddrive that I could go get, but I edit on a PC and he has a mac. The files would be so large it couldn't be FAT32 formatted. :-/

The only way to capture HDV is with some form of HDV device, and small HDV cams are usually cheaper than decks (assuming he's not shooting DV on an HDV cam). An SD cam won't play HDV footage, even though the tapes are the same.

So your choices are capturing from the original cam in real time, using a small deck like the Sony GV-HD700 (about $1000), a studio deck like the Sony m15 or m25 (starting around $2K) or using a cheap camcorder (used HC3s go for around $500 or so). This is all assuming they're shooting the Sony flavor of HDV, not JVC, which would require matching gear.

Capturing off the cam it was shot on is the best way to keep things friendly.

Your idea about capturing to a large HDD is a good one; your tapes would likely be split into smaller scenes (under 20 min or so, no?) so the FAT32 limitation might not apply. And there must be some way to capture to a format your PC/NLE can read, I would think.

Read http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/long-blac...ck-thread.html, which is actually where this question should have been posted.

Thanks! I think the HDD is the way to go. Fat 32 limits files to 4 gig right? And am I correct that you can't format a drive that is over 32 gb in Fat 32? Or is there a way around that?

Is there another format besides FAT32 and NTFS that can be used by both mac and PC? My understanding is that mac can read NTFS but can't write to it.

Okay, I just found a program called macdrive. I think that would solve the problem right? Anyone have any experience with it? I'm trying to find out if you can format it from the PC or if you have to format it from a MAC and I'm getting conflicting info :-/

Macdrive works great if you have a pc and want to read/write a mac formatted drive.

As an alternative, if a mac user installs macfuse and ntfs-g3 (both free) they will be able to read and write to an ntfs drive:

NTFS-3G for Mac OS X

I have this installed on my macbook pro, and have no problem capturing DV and HDV to ntfs drives.