Hi Jonathan
I still use MiniDV 'cus I've not updated my camera equipment (still saving for
that HD prosumer kit!).
MiniDV camcorders work best with Firewire connections. Years ago, you used to
have to buy a IEEE1394 Firewire PCI card to connect and control your
camcorder, but if you've got a modern PC, the chances are you've already got a
Firewire port.
Connecting the camcorder is one thing, but controlling it is another. The
best piece of software for this is a fairly useless video editing tool called
Kino, but it is able to control and capture your MiniDV footage.
A few years ago, there was a change in the Linux IEEE1394 stack, which meant
that depending on what distro you used, you could struggle getting your PC to
recognise the camcorder with Kino, and hence much fiddling was required. If
your distro is up to date, then it will use the new stack and you should be
fine.
Assuming you've already got everything you could possibly need;
1. Install Kino
2. Connect Camcorder to PC via Firewire cable (sometimes call iLink).
This
should have been provided with your camcorder.
3. Start Kino and switch on your camcorder - make sure it is in
playback
mode.
4. Click the "Capture" tab in Kino. If all goes well, you should see
that
the timecode display on your camcorder matches the display on Kino. If you
press the fast-forward or rewind button in Kino, your camcorder should respond
accordingly.
5. From this point its just a case of capturing the footage you need
for
editing later. Capturing does require a reasonable amount of system memory to
avoid any dropped frames. I would suggest at least a Gig of memory should be
free, so if you're a bit short on memory, make sure you're not running
anything heavy duty like OpenOffice, Openshot or blender in the background.
KDE
should be fine, but if you have dropped frames, try running Kino under Openbox
with RazorQT or LXDE.
Any problems or stuff you don't understand, then let me know. Oh, forgot to
mention: Captured video in Raw DV or DV AVI codecs will take up tonnes of
space - about 4GB per 20mins. So if you've got a couple of full tapes, make
sure you've got a good 20-30 spare GB!
Chris
On Wednesday 09 May 2012 12:18:20 Jonathan Gowar wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-05-08 at 18:17 +0100, Christopher Sandles wrote:
> > My primary use of Linux is as a home user, with occasional dabblings
> > in video and photo editing. I've always been keen to demonstrate to
> > the "man on the street" how Linux can compare with Windows and OSX,
> > and I think a "newbie" section or Home Users bit could be useful. On
> > the same lines, maybe a SysAdmin section, or development area for
> > other aspects of Linux usage might be worth considering?
>
> Using MiniDV (tape) capturing device? I'd like to know how to do that.
> I've a old Sony PCE-9 I'd like to capture from!
>
>
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