Handcam!

[mbatiri]

Hi everyone,
I've purchased a sony CH42E handycam which records movies on MiniDV tape.
It has Ppackage software for handling movies and pictures .
I used it and by USB port, I converted full tape records to VCD which lasted 6 hours for 60 minutes movie. It captures 10 minutes of movie in AVI format to hard disk(2 Gbyte) and convert it to MPEG file and does it to all of tape which last 6 hours.
At the end when I played the VCD, I noted that picture's quality is fine but its frame rate seems to be slow and it is noticeable.
Would anyone please let me know what I can do for its frame rate and is there any other way to conver tape movie to mpeg with fine quality and less time.
Best regards.

[Nix]

Firstly is your USB 2 or 1 ?

Secondly I think Firewire is faster than USB and preferable over USB2.

I think it alos depends on the speed of the machine doing the capturing as well.

[mbatiri]

Thanks for your reply,
My usb is 2 and I have firewire(iLink) and sony support this DV interface but for automatic CD burnning it doesn't permit to use firewire and should use USB.
You said machine speed related to this problem but I think it isn't dependance because machine transfer all tape information to hard and it only related to reducing of copy time but not frame rate.

[fink]

It's usually the conversion not the transfer that takes the most time. Converting video formats is a very system taxing process. If you have an older PC with little CPU, memory and a small drive with little available space there's not much you could do besides turn off any uneeded processes while you're doing the conversion (you can turn off your a/v and firewall temporarily if you disconnect from the internet.

Otherwise there are a number of other tools you can have a look at here... Some are freeware, all are good and may do the job more quickly than the software you're currently using.

http://www.videohelp.com/guides

Let us know what your computer specs are and what software you're using so we can get a better idea of the problem.

One thing I can tell you, on my 2.4G (cpu) 512Meg (mem) system it would take about an hour to convert a 3-400meg avi file to a more compressed format like wmv.

[mbatiri]

Hi and thanks fink for your reply,
My cpu is AMD 750MHZ with 389MB ram .
I use "Picture Package" software which is released by sony for its handycams.
I converted 12GB avi format file which has been read from tape directly by software and converted it to Mpeg file(VCD file) in 6 hours.
All functions run automatically between handycam and PC by software.
My important problem is its frame rate which looks like slow motion movies.
I think 15% lower than normal.
Whould you please tell me where is the problem? :o

[Nix]

I have done DV to mpeg format on my machine which is 950Mhz with 512MB ram and the end result was jerky although admittedly I was using USB1.

Your machine might not be fast enough ??

[mbatiri]

Hi nix
Would you please tell me what is the relation betwwen cpu speed and converted movie's frame rate?

[Nix]

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/expert/dunn_03august11_cpu.mspx

[photolady]

Firewire, Nix is not faster than USB2 with reports speeds of 480bps, while firewire is only 400bps.

This also could have to do with the amount of ram you have, less than is recommended for video's and your video card whichever that is needs to be more than 8mb to 16mb.