I just shot hours of footage at the GDC (Game Developers Conference), for a show (www.pansywarriorprincess.com, if you're interested), and since I always shoot straight from the camera into the computer via HDMI into a Blackmagic card, I've never used tape.

As you can imagine, carrying around a computer to capture uncompressed footage wasn't an option, so I shot HDV 24P using my HV20.

Now I'm at the editing system, and I did a quick test to make sure things are working. I hooked up the camera via firewire, and selected the HDV60i preset, and captured 2 minutes of footage.

It worked, but the preview window gave me some message in about 10 languages I didn't understand. (English was probably in there somewhere)

Anyway, the footage played back just fine. I rewound the tape, to start from the beginnning, and NOTHING!!!!!!!

The tape plays, but I just get a bluescreen on the camera's lcd and Premiere won't even capture. It does still control the camera.

I restarted Premiere, I tried a different tape, and I swapped out one HV20 for another HV20.

Any ideas?

-Sterling

updated info.

So I have learned that when the firewire cabe is plugged in, I will not get playback on the LCD. Maybe this is just my setup, and the multi-lingual screen in the premiere preiew window was telling me that playback was on hardware.

Any thoughts about making this a more pleasant experience?

-Sterling

When capturing HDV footage from a camera, Premiere Pro does not display the footage on your computer screen. The footage is displayed on the cameras LCD screen only.

As for the tape not playing at this time, it sounds like the tape got damaged or the heads on the camera need cleaning.

Mike

Thanks for the info, Mike.

It's a struggle, but it seems that the problem is in getting the communication between the camera and the computer.

I have now successfully loaded two tapes into the computer. One to go. This is a nightmare, that require a lot of fidgeting.

-Sterling