If you have a DV camcorder that has pass-through (sometimes labeled DV-AV or something similar in the camcorder menus), you can hook your analog source directly to the DV camcorder, which will then function as an A-D converter and send the signal via firewire to the computer. Not all DV camcorders do this, but many do. I know the Canon GL2 and XL2 both do, and I'm pretty sure some models from other companys do, too.

Failing that, you could copy to DV tape, then capture. But if you have a lot of material, that's a lot of head wear on your DV camcorder, not to mention tedious.

If none of the above is practical, then you will have to pick up an analog capture card. I haven't used the Pinnacle analog capture devices -- presumably they probably work ok...but I'll leave that to someone who is actually using one the them.

Thats a good idea. I do have a XL1S and I didn't want to use it to capture stuff because it puts wear on the heads, however, if it is just sending it to the comp, it's not actually putting any wear on the heads. I'll have to try this. Thanks for the responses.

I'm still interested to hear about the Pinnacle stuff if anyone uses it.

Hi all,

IMHO no card ( in the semipro class ) is worth the money any more. Get a decent computer and get realtime without any hazzle.

If you REALLY want/need MPEG encoding hardware, canopus has both an internal PCI card and an external box that will do MPEG only. Won't cost you a bunch either.

// Lazze \\

Let's compare rendering speeds.
 

I was curious just how fast others' pc's are working at as far as rendering goes with Premiere Pro so I can compare how my setup is doing. I don't remember seeng a discussion about this in the forum.

For example, a video with almost no effects or transitions except a couple of cross fade transitions- one at the beginning and one at the end, and just a couple of dozen straight cuts renders out to an DV AVI for me out in just a little over 50 % speed on my main workstation, a Dell 8300 P4 2.6 Ghz HT-enabled desktop with 1.25 Gb of RAM running Premiere Pro 1.5. For example a forty (40) minute video renders in approx twenty-two (22) minutes The same video used to render in just less than real time, approx. thirty (34) minutes for a forty (40) minute video using Premiere 6.5 on the same computer. So being optimized for Win XP and the hyper-threading makes quite a bit of difference I suppose.

Any of you guys have faster pc's that beat these render times (be honest, he he) and if so, what system and specs are you runnning?

p4,1gbram,266fsb,845 chipset
 

The spec above delivers similar results to yours. Motherboard vendors have posted benchmarks for years using premiere and Photoshop. Most users will know how to shut down the winxp dynamics and oprimxe their system for maximum performance.

The big switch for me was to dump the realtime capture board and go all software for rendering. Sure I no longer have realtime previews, but with wipes cuts and fades, I can previsualize this.

Premiere Pro is very stable.

You'll proberly find that the Pinnacle analogue capture cards will not work with Premiere.

Pinnacle used to bundle Premiere with some of their capture cards, but now that they have Edition they have stopped doing so.

I have an old DV500+ and that will only work with Premiere 6.5, you can still use the firewire ports to capture with Premiere Pro though!

As already mentioned you could use your XL1s, or by an external analogue to DV concertor (canopus do a few) or you'll have to buy a hardware acclerator card like Matrox RTX100 or some from the Canopus range.

Hope this helps,

shortcut for premiere 6.5
 

i just bought a contour "shuttlepro" for video capture with premiere 6.5, all the buttons set as i assigned them, but i couldn't find the shortcut key for the shuttle control at full speed in the video capture (rewind & fast forward while the video is playing)

can anybody help me out please !!!!

Why do you think the capture is going wrong? The capture with
DV / firewire is only a digital stream copy, so it basically cannot go
wrong, it either works or doesn't.

What are you using to play the file with?

I would just stick with the normal DV, it will save you time in other
places etc.

Have you tried contacting contour? It is more likely they'll have
an answer on that....

yeah,

I just captured straight DV. I'm doing a pre-edit on my machine, then I'm going to edit on a FCP system. I just have so much footage, and I'm sort of writing as I edit, so I thought I might try to capture low quality...mainly because I was having problems with dropped frames and I thought that might solve my problem. I did a search of the forum and someone mentioned defragging the harddrive. Did that and all went well...no dropped frames during 40 hours of video.

As a side note, most of my limited experience thus far has been editing film transfered to digibeta, and boy is DV a different beast. There are wierd little things with diagonal lines and I have an interview where a guy has his hair gelled spikey like and theres all this funny digital noise around his head. Interesting to learn though.

Rick

Rob,
Capturing at a lower rez, IE 15:1, or greater, is standard workflow for editing film, and SD though not so much for editing DV.

This is why AVID allows for it in capture settings. Someone editing a documentary say, with maybe a hundred hours of footage to work with, might downrez, capture, edit then uprez only the edited portions. BIG space saver on small (IE laptop) systems.

Hi Kim,

I think the adobe shortcut keys are 'F' for fastforward and 'R' for rewind.

Adobe has all the shortcut keys listed. Simply open Premiere go to the Help menu and then select Keyboard. All of the windows shortcut keys for Premiere are listed in there.

where did it go?
 

I recently moved all the avi files for a project to an external HD from the internal drive where they were captured to. Now Adobe cant find the files. How do I direct Adobe to the files without having to click on each separate file (50 plus) when asked for?

Is there a simple way to direct Adobe to the files? I thought I was being cool by organising all the video from one project in to one folder and moving that to an external. Hey it sounded good at the time!

If you tell it where one is and all the rest are also in that folder it should automatically find them.