HDlink issue - Conversion Crash
 

So I am trying to pull HDV footage off a A1 camera using HDlink. I tried using the capture where it captures m2t and converts to AVI. Problem was the resulting AVI was garbage, almost total fallout. I'm using a dell XPS 410 3GB ram, 2.66ghz, 8600 graphics card. Using a firewire cable. I assume it's a bandwidth issue. What specs does it take to capture and convert in one swoop?

My other issue is when I capture straight to m2t (which works fine) and try to convert to AVI using the Convert function. It will convert small files fine, but when I try converting a large m2t (1gb plus) the software locks up and crashes. Any ideas?

I can import m2t into AE and Premiere just fine. What are the downfalls to using m2t files instead of converted AVIs?

FireWire port of your PC is bad or poorly implemented. What is happening, is the increase processing load on the CPU (for transcoding) is repreventing all one of the packets form camera to PC form being serviced. This points to a poor FireWire implementation, and it is not a software failure. We been able to do this just working a PC hard while capturing M2T only (the M2T file get corrupted.) Camera M2T to PC transportation has no error recovery, so every packet much be received. Buy a $10 FireWire card from Fry's, fixes this in 95% of systems.

Thanks for the info David. I will purchase a new card and try again.

David, that however doesn't explain why converting m2t to AVI locally fails on large files. Any idea there?

M2T errors that don't hurt AE might still hurt our conversion. There is no reason for a short conversion to work and a long one to fail -- all the same to software, unless there are errors in the bitstream. I think a FireWire replacement is still a likely fix.