Questions about DVD style camcorder

[Tim Bickford]

I agree. I really appreciate your help. I honestly think the DVD style cameras are junk. I've heard more horror stories than good.

Thanks again!

[Robert M Wright]

If you go through a capture card (with S-Video or composite), it will be no faster than real time, just to get it in the computer at all, and you'll take a serious quality hit.

Having VOB2MPG re-wrap the video and audio streams into MPG files on your hard drive, directly from the DVD disk, can be done faster than real time (and is lossless).

[Tim Bickford]

Robert,

Thanks again! I was looking for a quick easy fix for this guy. I'll experiment on a DVD using VOB2MPG.

Thank you!

[Jonathan Jones]

Originally Posted by Tim Bickford

I honestly think the DVD style cameras are junk. I've heard more horror stories than good.

IMO, junk indeed. I think these camcorders are probably the 2nd worst sham pulled on entry level dv consumers in the past few years. While many people say they'll buy these models due to the simple convenience of "just popping the disc right into the home DVD player", it turns out that after the first time doing this, and after shooting a disc full of dark shaky footage, they occasionally come to realize the potential benefits to even rudimentary post editing, and the degree of complications to achieve that end (while quite do-able with the right tools and know-how as noted in above posts ) are inversely proportional to the earlier perceived degree of convenience of shooting on the miniDVD format.

Many folks I know who have fallen into this trap never bothered to seek advice from folks who might know better, but were instead swayed by a sales pitch from a uniformed salesman in an electronics big box store who most likely didn't know any better themselves.

There are also 2 common "gotcha's" that afflict un-informed consumers.

1.) Despite the 'finalizing' of the recorded disc, there are still reported problems of a large number of home DVD players that are simply unable to recognize the DVD much less play back the contents.

2.) Most of these camcorders record to a miniDVD. Due to the recent trend of computer manufacturers to use slot-load DVD drives in their computers as opposed to the more traditional tray-load drives, there are many instances of folks who want to play back the miniDVDs on their computer DVD player (or see if they can edit the contents) and slide the miniDVD into the slot-load DVD drive. Bye-Bye drive....and if they don't know what they are doing, bye bye $300 for repair costs. (By contrast, many tray-load drives have a conforming miniDVD indentation to accommodate the disc.)

The fact that several lines of camcorders using this format saw a drop in retail pricing of 60% in less than a year might indicate some blow-back from poor customer experience. One can hope this to be a signal of early demise for an ill-conceived camcorder design.

I could rant on this topic for a while, but I think I should probably get a cup of coffee instead.

-Jon

[Robert M Wright]

Frankly, there's just no such animal as a well thought out system for consumers (like soccer moms, for example) to casually shoot video, and then easily make minor edits (cut and splice clips) and turn it into a disk they can pop in their DVD player and watch, without some sort of hassle.

[Tim Bickford]

Jonathan,

Very well said! Your post should be made into a skicky. I'm sure there is a spot for it.

Robert makes a good point. However, if you think about it, not to long ago soccer moms and dads would just pop a roll of film into their Super-8 and shoot. A week or two later the whole family watched it on the "big screen" in the living room. Every precious piece of that film was watched and appreciated - and in most cases with no sound. All mom and dad had to do is feed it into the projector. Well.... unless it broke. Then they'd have to get that funky little splicing unit out.

Thanks again for all your help. I will let you know how this all turns out.

[Tom DelRosario]

Nice timely thread. I have an old Canon ZR 10 that just died on me, so I need to get a replacement for home movies. I guess I can scratch DVD camcorders off the list.

So, what about Flash and hard drive based camcorders? They seem to all record in MPEG-2 format, right? So I still have to go through a conversion process to get the footage into my NLE?

It seems the consensus on this thread is to just get miniDV, if you can't (or don't want) to go to HD capture, correct?

[Bruce Foreman]

I just got a flash mem based cam (Canon Vixia HF100), shot and completed a UWOL challenge entry with it.

Plugged in the SDHC card & reader to a USB port on the computer and copied over all the video clips to the "captured video" folder for Pinnacle Studio 11 on the computer.

Fired up Studio and began dropping clips on the timeline, trimming, some post processing improvements on some clips, added transitions and music, and rendered to a file for submission.

NLE's will be different, but Pinnacle Studio handled the .mts files with no transcoding and everything worked pretty much the same as I was used to with tape based.

With hi def and AVCHD it does take some more computer horsepower than editing used to, but...Progress...

[Bill Rankin]

I have a Hitachi DVD camera (client's) that I need to pull video from the DVD that is inserted into the camera. I see a firewire port, but when I attach to my computer, the flip out LCD screen goes black and nothing shows on PrePro 2.

Can I pull video from a camera that records only on DVD????

Also, I tried to transfer the footage by placing the disc in my DVD burner in my computer. No luck...

[Jonathan Jones]

Originally Posted by Bill Rankin

I have a Hitachi DVD camera (client's) that I need to pull video from the DVD that is inserted into the camera. I see a firewire port, but when I attach to my computer, the flip out LCD screen goes black and nothing shows on PrePro 2.

Can I pull video from a camera that records only on DVD????

Also, I tried to transfer the footage by placing the disc in my DVD burner in my computer. No luck...

Are you sure it is a firewire port? Most of these models come with a USB 2.0 connection, but either way, in general these units generally don't capture into your NLE in the same manner most other types of camcorders do.

There are some exceptions, but as far as I know it is very 'hit and miss'. The primary reason is that such camcorders really weren't designed with the intention of producing footage that was destined to be edited on a computer. Therefore, the format is an end-user presentation format. In some cases, the manufacturers ended up putting some very rudimentary editing features within the camcorder itself, but these are generally pretty worthless.

So in the end, there developed a need to figure out how to get the footage out of these cams and into a regular computer based NLE. There are a few options to consider.

Some NLEs have recently been equipped to recognize such DVD based camcorders and will allow a transfer of the recorded data into the NLE. In some cases, a time-consuming transcoding will be required to make the footage compatible with what the NLE can handle. Often, the NLE will have to be the most current version, and even then, such compatibility is narrowed to a small range of manufacturers and models. There doesn't seem to be any golden rule about this. You can sometimes check the website of your NLE's company for an update of compatible camera formats and models.

Quite often, it is pretty workable to simply put the DVD into your computers DVD drive. (NOTE: If the recording medium is a miniDVD, be sure to only use a tray-load drive that has an accomodating compatible indent in the tray. If you try to use a slot-drive drive with a miniDVD..... bye bye drive.)

As you noted, when you attempted to put the disc into your drive, nothing showed up. This could be an indication that the DVD was not 'finalized' in the camcorder. Many DVD based camcorders maintain the recording content and DVD in a sort of 'dynamic' state, presumably to allow the user to make a few rudimentary edits and add titles, etc, until they wish to offload the finished video - at which point the camera must 'finalize' the DVD to make it 'presentation ready' or basically to make the disc readable. You may need to check the owners manual of the camcorder to ascertain if this will resolve your dilemma.

Once the DVD is recognized in your computer drive, you should be able to open up the disc and locate the requisite video files. If they don't easily enough drag right into your NLE and are recognized as 'compatible' you should simply drag them onto your hard drive and transcode/convert them into a compatible video format (avi or .mov or whatever you NLE and system requires.) There are a great many freeware, shareware, and fee-based solutions available on the net to convert such files into your desired format. There are also some expensive boxed solutions available at your local computing retailer. Each option has its benefits and detriments. Mpegstreamclip is probably the most popular one I know of.

Good luck.

Hope this helps.

-J.

BTW: Just for S's and G's, (not that anyone asked) I offer my opinion about what I REALLY think about these camcorders in the following thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...770#post851770

-J.

[Tom Hardwick]

If you used Edius you could simply insert the DVD into your computer and plonk the footage straight onto the timeline.

[Bill Rankin]

Thanks....

I don't use or have Eduis software, unfortunately....but I'll try to finalize the DVD and see if that will work. I'll check out the freeware available.

Again, thanks Jonathan and Tom.

[Bill Rankin]

And by the way, Jonathan, you're right, no firewire only a USB port

[Will Aldersley]

Hey..

A friend has asked me for help retrieving footage he recorded on one of those mini disc - DVD camcorder. It's footage of a once in a life time holiday in California. He had his camera stolen but retained all the mini-dvd discs but they don't play or seem to have any files on them when I tried to view them on my PC. Is there any way of finding these lost files. I can see the disc have data on them with the naked eye but nothing is registering when I open it. Does it need formatting in some way?
thanx in advance guys.

[Will Aldersley]

Hey..

A friend has asked me for help retrieving footage he recorded on one of those mini disc - DVD camcorder. It's footage of a once in a life time holiday in California. He had his camera stolen but retained all the mini-dvd discs but they don't play or seem to have any files on them when I tried to view them on my PC. Is there any way of finding these lost files. I can see the disc have data on them with the naked eye but nothing is registering when I open it. Does it need formatting in some way?
thanx in advance guys.