Simple capture on Mac???
 

I'm a long time Windows user, but recently bought a MacBook Pro - quite nice.

I have Vegas and Sound Forge installed under Win XP under VMware Fusion, and will probably put Cineform on the virtual machine as well, so the editing environment will be the same as on my Windows desktop.

Is there a simple capture utility (preferably low cost or free) that will capture the files from the camera so I can hand them off to Vegas for editing?

iMovie seems to work, but it wasn't immediately obvious how to get the video into something Vegas would ingest without re-rendering.

Years ago I used BTV pro, but it hasn't been updated in a long time and probably won't work on Intel: http://www.bensoftware.com/index.html

Not sure what issues you'd have with iMovie when using with PC applications. Might be more trouble than it's worth. I found this with Google, but not clear on exactly what it does...

http://www.kandalu.net/products/kcapture/overview.php

Does VMware really run those Windows applications properly? I'm surprised. I have Windows XP on my MacBook Pro and can boot directly into it or run it under Parallels. It can be very handy to do some things with Parallels, but for maximum compatability you really need to boot the Mac into Windows directly with Boot Camp.

I'm on the road so haven't had much time to fool with this, but I was able to get a couple of short clips into iMovie and export them under MacOS, then bring them into Vegas under XP under VMware and they seemed OK. I tried this with a couple of cineform clips that I had previously captured and Vegas crashed as soon as I got the clips in. I'll try again tonight when I get to the next hotel.

Not quite clear on why you don't just boot your mac into Windows and capture with Vegas? Seems like it would be simpler and more reliable. I don't know anything about VMWare, but when processing some large files with other programs, it goes significantly faster when booting directly into XP as opposed to running XP under Parallels.

Well, generally speaking I don't like to keep re-booting the system, and for some other things I do with the system I have some files that go back and forth between the Mac and the Win XP virtual machine. But it would certainly make life simpler, I must admit:<)

Anyhow, just to see what would happen I captured about 15 minutes of DV on my Windows machine and then copied the files over to the Mac and opened Vegas under XP under VMware and did a few simple edits and rendered it out. Seemed to run about as well as on the native Windows machine. I didn't do any scientific measurements, but it certainly wasn't a slouch.

By the way, I was able to open the sound track for editing in Sound Forge from the Vegas menu - everything seems to work reasonably well.

I have found Parallels really useful for many things in Windows, although I haven't tried running an NLE under it. I ran a program for converting/compressing some video for my iPod Touch and it ran much slower under Parallels, perhaps only 60% of the speed when booted directly into Windows.

But now and then I notice some buggy behavior which would make me reluctant to do anything "mission critical" in Windows unless I had booted directly into it. The other day I couldn't get rid of the Mac cursor in the Windows virtual machine. It chased around the Windows cursor until it drove me crazy enough to reboot ;-)

Somewhat related thread: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=124909

I think in the end I'll probably wind up booting into Windows for any heavy editing - but on the other hand, I probably would wait until I got home for any really heavy editing. I was just looking for something to use while on the road to capture and maybe make a rough edit.

One reason I like to keep the MacOS up is for e-mail. I use G-mail so I can access e-mail from either Win or Mac, but the Mac has an advantage because it will display Japanese text correctly in the e-mail whereas Windows isn't so good at it. Probably not an issue for most people, but all of my real work clients are in Japan and I do get a fair amount of Japanese e-mail.

Jim,

Actually Qucktime Pro does this all by itself.

If you use any of the Apple Pro Apps you already own QTPro - if not it's a cheap upgrade to the Quicktime already installed on your mac.

Just launch Quicktime Pro and under the File Menu you'll see "New Movie Recording" - it's smart enough to look at the Firewire and USB ports and if it sees a video stream, you'll see the video on the capture window with a big red "RECORD" button.

After capture, you do rudimentary editing using the L and J shaped clip start and stop brackets under the timeline and export only the part of the clip you want. Then you can open any clip up in QT Pro and use "Save As" to transcode the video into anything from AVI to Divx to WMV.

Simple and cheap.

Bill,

"Doumo arigatou gozaimashita" as "we" say - or "thank you very much - respectfully" for your suggestion. I would never have thought of Quicktime in a million years.

iMovie worked on a couple of short captures, but I have no idea how they save it or what they do to it when you export it.

I'll give it a try.

I'm not much of a Mac expert but after over 20 years as a Windows user I've decided to pass on Vista. I bought half a dozen extra copies of XP so I should be OK for a while yet.

Bill,

Quick question

I upgraded Quicktime. When I look at the capture options, they offer good (Mpeg 4), better (h.264), best (h.264), and device native.

What do you think they mean by "device native"? For example, would this mean m2t for HD? What would it be for SD?

Should I assume that this means that they don't do any additional compression etc? If so, this would seem like the way to go. I have to admit that I've never paid much attention to how SD is actually stored as I mainly shoot in HD, and have been capturing as Cineform

I'll play around with all this tonight, and eventually it should become clear. I hope.

Parallels works great but I wouldn't recommend editing under parallels. The mac pro does a good job with bootcamp if you boot into windows, editing is possible.

I use parallels and vegas to convert my quicktimes to WMV, it's slow but works. Once you install parallels booting to windows doesn't work anymore. You have to boot into OS X and then run parallels to get windows to work. On my other Mac pro, I have bootcamp and boot into windows and editing in vegas works great as well as capture functions.

Thanks for all the responses. Here's the latest status

I upgraded Quicktime as Bill suggested, then hooked the camera to my firewire switch (both my Win desktop and my MacBook could see it)

Opened QT Pro on the Mac and recorded a few clips to the desktop using "device native" setting.

Started XP and opened Vegas. Then opened my shared folders and saw the Mac desktop. I then opened the clips I had just recorded directly from Vegas.

Everything worked fine and I could edit the captured video directly with no transcoding step.

Not sure about Parallels, but VMware fusion has a mode called "Unity" where you don't see the Windows (or other OS) desktop at all, but can open Win apps directly from the VMware applications bar - they show up on the Mac desktop intermingled with Mac apps. Quite nice.

By the way, with the Windows desktop displayed, I could simply drag the movie from the Mac desktop into the Windows desktop, then drag it onto the Vegas timeline from the Windows desktop.

I have to admit that I've been a huge fan of virtualization ever since I worked at IBM's ad tech center in Cambridge MA in the mid-sixties. My group was working on computer processing of natural and artificial languages. The other major group in the center was developing a virtual machine system which is still quite widely used today. Virtual systems have been around for over 40 years now - nothing new. I was even using a virtual machine system that ran on the 386 based PC's in the late 80's

Not true. It depends on how you configure things when you install Parallels. If you want to be able to use bootcamp, you need to partition your disk and choose the correct option in Parallels install.

Downside is that you must have an actual disk partition for the Bootcamp method, and on a laptop it can be a tough call how much to allocate to each OS. If you just install Parallels the regular way (as Jon has done) then it stores the entire Windows filesystem in a special format within a single Mac file. This file can grow and shrink as needed, so it makes very efficient use of disk space. But the downside there (aside from not being able to boot into windows) is that everytime one little file changes under windows, your Mac backup software (such as Time Machine) will want to backup the ENTIRE windows filesystem.

If you install Parallels with the bootcamp option however, it sees this as two separate virtual machines, and that means you will need to activate Windows TWICE, which is a nuisance. Online activation will fail the second time since Microsoft will think you've already installed that copy of Windows. However the fix is pretty simple. Just use the phone activation option, which connects you to an automated system. Tell it that you are re-installing your copy of windows on the same hardware and everything should be fine.

Further Update
 

I've captured a few short clips with Quicktime/MacOS and edited with Vegas/XP/VMware

Everything worked well.

Yesterday I tried it with a fairly long video and Quicktime stopped capturing after about 2 minutes with a message saying it had reached its maximum. I think it said max file size, but not 100% sure I'm remembering that part correctly. I was using the "Device Native" setting.

I couldn't find any way to increase the length of the capture. I may play around further with iMovie.

Anyhow, I broke down and loaded Final Cut Express on the system. I'm not particularly interested in learning a new NLE, but it seems to work fine for capture, and I can probably do most everything I need to with it while I'm on the road. Although at the moment I'm just capturing with it.