what format is digital video stored in?

[mcveigh]

I have someone with a sony digital video camera. If i hook up her camera to her pc with the fire wire cable can I just drag and drop the files over to the hard drive?

what format are the files in?

Thanks!

 

[Glitchny]

you should be qable to just drag and drop the files, they are most likley mpeg

glitch

 

[oldfart]

On the tape, the format is DV. You can't drag and drop files. There are no files to drag and drop. You have to capture the video to a file. It is typically an AVI file. You would then convert the AVI to MPEG1/2/4 or whatever you need. You can also capture to MPEG2 directly, but with a quality loss. Do some reading here.

 

[pulse8]

The format is DV. Like was mentioned before, you need software to transfer the video from the camera to the computer such as Adobe Premiere.

The way DV works, is the video is actually compressed and digitized inside the camera while taping.

 

[grrl]

If I can tag a question onto this thread, since AVI is Microsoft's format, does that mean it has only one set format (MJPEG?) or does it differ according to the capture card's manufacturer?

 

[SemperFi]

If you are running XP you can use movie maker to capture. I don't remember running any software that came with camera. Although I have been wrong before.

As I recall I pluged in the camera the os detects it when you power on the cam. Then start movie maker and it should be able to use the cam. Movie maker seems easy to use although I have only used it once. I just got my cam a couple of months ago. It took me longer to figure out how to use the program than it did to download the video.

grrl from what I have read AVI is not Microsoft format it is Divx. I believe the microsoft version is a decoder only. I am not sure of that though.

 

[oldfart]

AVI is like a wrapper. You still need a codec such as MJPEG, HUFFY, Divx ,etc

 

[pulse8]

AVI isn't specific to one codec. It's similar to Quicktime where it's more of a shell for the video file with various codecs that can be played.