For Christmas and school results and so on, Mum and Dad gave me the embarrassingly generous gift of a digital video camera! A Sony DCR-TRV22E to be precise. Does anyone have this camera or something similar to it? No doubt with my new toy I’ll come up with a whole new batch of questions for John and Phil and the rest of you. Thanks a lot in advance for whatever help you give me.
I’m all excited to transfer a few little test videos from the camera to the computer to see what the quality is like but I can’t find any helpful instructions. Can anyone help me? The camera came with Image Mixer and Image Transfer but they can’t seem to find the camera source or something like that.
I also have a general question. The camera captures video in really good detail so what do you do with all these bits and pieces when you’re trying to edit them and make a movie? I’ve heard of these loss-less codecs. Do they compress the file size much at all? Where can I get one?
I couldn’t believe I got this camera…it’s brilliant! I’m going to have sooooo much fun making heaps of movies.
If anyone of you have this camera or a similar model I’d really appreciate a little help.
That’s the first challenge. If it uses firewire then I don’t think there is anything to configure; it just happens by magic. If it uses other connections to some kind of video capturing card then it depends on the software with that card, I suppose. Either way there has to be somewhere for it to plug into (obviously), so you may need to go grab yourself a firewire card or something (unless you already have one); they’re not that pricey.
Once you’ve done that you’ll need software to get the picture off; presumably the camera came with something, but if not (or if it’s rubbish) I use a free little program called “WinDV” (I think; it’s on my other computer 230 miles away). Plug the camcorder in, turn it on, click “Record” on the computer, press “Play” on the camera and voila (hopefully) it’ll start recording stuff.
I’ve not used any lossless codecs, but I can’t see much point unless you’re doing line animations or something where you want to avoid all fuzziness. I would think a lossy codec with a high bitrate would be pretty indistinguishable from a lossless codec but would result in a much smaller file.
I don’t have a Video cam, and I don’t know a thing about video editing. But here is something you might want to check out if you have Windows XP or osX. http://www.avid.com/freeDV/index.asp
Phil,
I think I’m meant to transfer stuff by USB until I buy myself a firewire thingy as an upgrade. I take it it’s much faster to put video onto the computer via firewire. WinDV sounds like my sort of program…nice and easy. About the codecs, would one of these lossful ones that you speak of produce something good enough to be used in a very amateur DVD? Could you please name some good ones? Are they already part of WinDV?
Daniel,
Thanks. At the moment we have Windows 98 but we’re getting a new computer very soon with all the latest stuff.
I just saw two kids that are like 10 and there all thugged out with the oversized hat with a flat brim and close twice the size of them. psh who where’s clothes that are only htwice their size mine are all at least 3 times and I where a trucker hat just like pharrel. shout outs to pharrel.
I’ve absolutely no idea how a USB transfer would work; there might not be a standard like FireWire, so you might be stuck with the program that came with it. The WinDV website only mentions capturing with Firewire, but the list of devices on my computer includes the webcam so you could give it a try and see if it notices.
About lossy codecs… I’ve only used DivX as far as I can remember; it has a good enough range of quality / filesizes for me. I haven’t the faintest idea how to go about making a DVD. Don’t DVDs all have to be MPEG2?
WinDV doesn’t come with any codecs; it just saves the video into DV format. I dunno if it needs a codec to do that, but I presume one would come with the camera software if it did.
That’s all I can think of. I’m now off to nominate this post for the “least useful post” award…
Huffyuv is a lossless video codec. The author seems to have gone AWOL and his web page at the Berkeley University math department is all gone. However, there is a web archive of his page available here. You can download the codec from the link in the archived web page.
The software with your camera may include a DV codec that will allow you to edit the DV format video using VirtualDub and other video editing tools. If you didn’t get a DV codec with the camera you can buy software packages that include a DV codec. I don’t know if there are any freeware or open source DV codecs available.
Web sites like Afterdawn, doom9, andDVDRhelp have a lot of info on how to rip a DVD and how to capture video but not a lot of info on how to edit video from a DV camcorder. They’re still good resources though.
DV Central has some good info on DV video and DV video editing.
When you get the new computer get a second hard drive for it. Something over 100 GB. Dedicate that second hard drive for video editing files. Format that drive with NTFS (you’ll need Windows 2000 or Windows XP to use the NTFS file system). NTFS will allow you to make files that are bigger than 4 GB. FAT32 is limited to files no larger than 2 GB or 4 GB (I can’t remember which).
Depends on how you want to release the final product. Do you want the final result to be a downloadable file for the computer or a DVD type video that you watch on a TV?
If you want to watch the video on TV then you may want to record the video as interlaced.
If you want to watch the video on a computer then you’ll want to record the video as progressive. Interlaced video looks horrible on a computer screen. Some DVD players and TVs can play progressive video on a TV screen.
The resolution and format you want will depend on what you want for the final result.
You can do it. They’re making editing software now that makes the process easier. A lot of the guides focus on ripping DVDs and using free or hacked tools to do the work. Making your own movie from a DV camcorder is a different process and with the right software should not be too complicated.
Microsoft has a free download for Windows XP called Windows Movie Maker 2 that allows you to easily edit DV movies.
Excellent, I’ll check it out when we get a new computer with XP. I managed to get a little bit further with putting the video onto the computer today. I’m using the USB cable that was supplied. When I play it back on the computer (before transferring it) the quality is really nice and it all looks really smooth. When I try to transfer it to the computer though, it comes out with about 3 frames per 10 seconds and those frames seem to be pretty bad quality. I always thought that with a reasonably good quality digital video camera you could make movies that look fine on a television. Am I wrong? I’d really like to make this work because we’ve now filmed some great stuff for the movie. What I really want is to be able to put it onto the computer uncompressed but I’m not sure that it will do that. Any help? I looked through the ‘help’ section but it didn’t really help.
Some cameras transfer a lower quality video over the USB 1.1 port than they do over the Firewire/iLink/IEEE1394 port due to the slower transfer speed of the USB port. Essentially, the camera turns into a fancy webcam when you use the USB port. That may be what is going on with your camera.
The other option is that your computer is not able to handle the high datarate of the DV compressed video stream and is choking. The computer needs to read and process a lot of data to keep up with the bitrate of the DV compressed video stream.
Okay, thanks. Looks like I should wait until we get a new computer which will be very soon. I’ll be sure to buy myself one of those DV cables. There’s a section i nthe program that came with the camera for using them so it shouldn’t be too difficult. Thanks John.