Tinkered for a while, and did a LOT of background reading. This is what I came up with:

The video footage i was working with was originally Hi8 analog, converted by a Dazzle card. It converted the footage to MPEG-1. Apparently, Premiere doesn't really like that. When I imported my own miniDV footage, no problem whatsoever. Premiere seemed to like that previous analog/Dazzle/MPEG-1 when it was converted (in another program) to .AVI. Once exported to Premiere, no problem. And...I am happy to say that I didn't have to resort to brain surgery on the system of any kind.

Thanks to everyone for the help and advice. This online community really is better than tech support!

-----Dave.

Maybe stupid, but do you hit play before hitting record? That is
what I must do to get it to work....

Your welcome! Glad you found your problem. Try to tell people
as much as possible about your system/problem. MPEG1 might
have been a valuable clue. I more or less assumed it was DV
material.

Oh well.. Good luck!

Tell me you are serious? Then Premiere is stupid none of my other Capture apps needs me to hit play, what a joke, but I'll try it! VV3 and Studio when you hit record they spin up the CAM.

Well Premier is stupid! I hit play and it starts capturing! DAH! What bad implementation for such a pricey program. Also I noticed that when it is capturing I can't touch anything else or the captur stops. What stupidity form a high end app. Another strike against Premiere! I may be better off capturing in Studio and then use the captured AVI in Premiere.

It is indeed pretty silly, I agree. Glad that worked for you. Suddenly
that idea popped in my head. I remembered have some difficulty
myself upon first use. Heh.

Cheers!

Thanks! It works fine now. I am not happy the way Premiere does captures. You would expect more form Adboe and for the prices they charge! Also the fact that I can not do anything else is insane, even in $79 Studio I can capture awhile doing other things! Well I may just be capturing in Studio or VV# and then when I need Premiere I will import the clips. Thanks again!

18 Minute limit on Premiere 6
 

Does any body know if there is a way to remove/workaround the 18 minute video capture limit in Premiere? Thanks.

There is no 18 minute limit in Premiere. I'm pretty certain the
problem is with your filesystem. Please answer the following:

1. What OS are you running?
2. What version of Premiere?
3. What filesystem do you have on your capture drive? Fat or
NTFS? You can right-click on a drive and select properties to
see this.

The problem is that 18 minutes is 4 GB of needed disc space. Only
NTFS filesystem supports files larger than 4 GB. So you need to
run Windows 2000 or XP and have the drive formatted as NTFS.
Then you can capture as long as you want.

Good luck.

Hi Rob,
Here are the answers to your questions:
1. I am running Windows 98SE.
2. I have version 6.02 of Premiere.
3. The filesystem on my drive is FAT32.
So I guess I need to either ghost my drive and then format it to NTFS or just up the money and finally buy XP.

Thanks!

there are some capture software that can do a "seamless" capture. where it seems like it'll cap a whole tape, but it's just splitting up the files into whatever lenght/size you specify (under the OS size limit of course). i believe (not 100% sure) ulead can do this. i know canopus has software specific to their products that can do this, i would think others (matrox, pinnacle) would have this too, depending on what you're capturing with. either way i'd still pony up and get w2kpro or winxp pro.

edit: also win9x does not support or recognize ntfs.

Re: 18 minute limit
 

G'day Scott,

Not sure if this is your problem or not but I was having a similar run when I remembered I had to tick "Capture as reference AVI" in the capture options. I think thats what it's called, can't check just now as I'm capturing 2.5 hours of a stage show.

Now that said I am using Prem 6.5/storm2, could be differnt to prem 6.

Cheers...Paul.

Thanks Paul...What OS do you use though? That might make a difference.

18 Minute limit on Premiere 6
 

Scott, the reference AVI is a setting introduced by a Canopus card's presence. In my Premiere 6 it shows up as a DV Raptor capture option. It's how Canopus gets around the VfW file size limit, creating a series of files that appear seamless in editing. I run Win2k Pro on NTFS drives and still have a file size issue thanks to the Canopus codec. I can make files of any size, but can only capture up to 2GB per file - except via the reference AVI option, which I don't use.

David Hurdon

Yes, you really need to NTFS, but Win98 does not have that option.

If you do not want to go XP, you could go Win2K.

However, you do not need to worry about the capture limit unless its just too much of a hassle for you. You can capture an entire tape as 18 minute segments and render the entire tape back without the loss of one frame.

Happy Holidays,

Yeah I thought about doing that where i could capture in little 18 minute segments, but that is way too much work for me. I want to start capturing, play the tape and come back 60 minutes later with the whole tape on my HD. I need to do this continusly for several tapes so I can't sit around and start/stop my tape and capture every 18 minutes. That would be a real pain! Well this you guys! You have been a great help. Gotta go XP!

Thanks again!