Need help capturing with my DV cam

[BD2003]

Having a little trouble with my DV cam here. Never ripped anything before.

Ive got the firewire plugged in and ready, and it can capture video, but it wont allow me to set a framerate or change the capture resolution or anything. And not having it captured in an interlaced format would mean the world to me right now.

The video was shot in the widescreen mode, but when captured its stretchy. I'd like to be able to set the res to 640x360 (16:9), the frame rate to 24 and progressive video.

Can anyone help me out here? Do I need new drivers or what? I cant seem to find them on sony's site.

I'm using ulead media studio pro to capture with.

Oh, and Im using the firewire port on my audigy.

If I cant rip it at anything but default, whats a quick and easy way to deinterlace DV files?

 

[BD2003]

Please?

 

[DanFungus]

If I were you, I'd get Premiere 6.0, or even 5.1. They are much better than Ulead, IMO. I don't even want to touch Ulead after using Premiere. With that said, I don't know, since I don't use it. Bump, and good luck with yuor problem

 

[Boogak]

I use VirtualDub for all my deinterlacing needs. And it's free!

 

[BD2003]

I tried to use vdub, but it wouldnt read the dv video. Any way to get a plugin or something?

 

[pulse8]

You cannot change the framerate and resolution when DV is being transferred to the computer.

With DV, the video was digitized when you shot it. When you bring it in via firewire, you're just transferring 1s and 0s. It's the beauty of DV because there is no quality loss into the computer and out of the computer.

If you want to change the resolution, framerate and deinterlace it, you must do this AFTER it has been captured or capture the video via an analog method.

 

[BD2003]

I figured that. I suppose those options were only for analog cameras? Makes perfect sense then. So a few questions then.

I'm making a movie out of this, so I want it to look as movielike as possible. Its likely to be shown on a computer monitor more than anything else so I want to do away with interlacing.

So whats the best way to convert the 30fps interlaced video to 24fps progressive? I'm not a rookie, I know how to use vdub, it just didnt work when I tried to read the avi. Maybe I need a new version?

I assume the deinterlace comes first, then the resize, than the framerate conversion? I know you can convert 24fps to 30fps using 3:2 pulldown, but how does it work the other way around? Obviously some frames are going to be dropped, but how exactly does it go through that process? Will it look jumpy or smooth?

Also, DV video is HUGE. I'd love to keep the video in the dv codec as long as possible, that way to minimize compression artifacts, but since I'm already modifying the source, what codec should I use?

Divx and mpeg are tiny, but they take forever to encode (I'm dealing with hours of footage), and theres a noticible quality drop even at the highest settings. Uncompressed is obviously out of the question.

I'd like to keep it around 1gb per 15 mins. What else is out there? Doesnt have to be totally lossless (would be nice), but it has to stay relatively true to the source image, much better than divx at least. It would also have to be avi compatible.

 

[pulse8]

Changing the framerate and deinterlacing won't make it look like film. It'll make the file smaller for playing on a computer, but it won't look like film if you do it.

If you're using Premiere to capture, you can just export the clip you captured and set the compression, resolution and framerate when you do.

Any other form of compression is going to take a long time to compress unless you have a hardware codec. It's just the nature of the process. You're recompressing every frame and it's very CPU intensive.

Unless you stay in the DV format, you're going to lose quality. It's a large format because it's not compressed as much as other codecs.

I doubt you could get Divx to look as good with the size. Someone may be able to prove otherwise. If you're going to be dumping it back out to tape, then my suggestion is to keep it in DV format on your system. If it's a space issue, then I would bite the bullet and buy a 100GB hard drive to keep the footage on and do it that way. DV is a great editing codec and you don't find much better without paying a lot of money. If you try to edit it in a codec such as Divx or most mpeg, you're going to run into problems. They aren't made for editing.

 

[BD2003]

I understand that going down to 24fps isnt going to make it look exactly like film. But for my previous movie, everyone thats seen it 24fps thought it looked significantly more professional than 30fps. It looked a little off, but 30fps looked like a cheap vcr tape. I guess we're all so used to seeing movies at 24fps and tv at 30fps that seeing something at 24 gives it that movie-like feel.

Last time around I only had 10gb of space to work with, so I had to downsize everything to 320x240 mpeg. Compression artifacts everywhere, and I'd like to avoid that this time. I have 40gb, but I know thats not going to be enough. I need some form of compression, 10mbps for a 640x360 stream would be fine. Any other AVI codecs I could look into, regardless of encoding time?

Its not going to get dumped back to tape, its going to get DVD burned in the end. So in the end its going to mpeg2.