Anyone capturing direct to a laptop?

Phil Brown

Phil Brown

Active member
Would be interested to hear of anyone capturing direct to a laptop hard drive.

I use premier pro - could you start the capture utility and record direct?

Just thinking it would save a lot of tape, and hous of conversion time.

Phil
 
You could...

But get DV Rack. It will do that and SO much more.

But I usually put a tape in, anyway. Instant archive. :-)

Dan
 
..sure you could record direct to your laptop with any NLE or capture utility.

PPRO will work fine.. just like you an capture direct from camera to a desktop through the capture utility.. you can to a laptop.
 
PK Gillock said:
I sometimes record straight to my laptop when doing interior shoots.
Click to expand...
I first glance I thought you wrote, "inferior" shoots. :shocked: Which raises the question, what do you use for the "important" ones?
 
Thanks for the quick replies guys,

Just looked at DV Rack - looks like a must have. Thanks for the tip Dan

Phil
 
I have used Premiere pro to capture straight to HD, but I must say, we also downloaded the trial version of DV rack, and it works MUCH better for capturing directly to tape. Premiere works, but that's not really what it's designed to do, so not only does it lose some of the functionality of DV rack, but there is a huge lag in monitoring time. Its as if something happens live, and 2 seconds later premiere sees it...It does work though....
 
I have done direct-to-harddrive with apple iMovie. The lag is less than a second, but it's there. The quality seems good, even though the footage is captured in "DV Stream" fromat. BTW, DVRack HD is out now, or soon.

-ab
 
The HDV PowerPak (an upgrade for DV Rack) was not quite out the door when AB posted on Sunday, but it is now. If you're a registered owner of DV Rack and you opted to receive product notices from us, you should have received an e-mail announcement of this product's release, complete with word of a limited-time 25% discount. (Feel free to drop me an email if you did not get that notice--mmapes@seriousmagic.com.)
 
DV Rack is an excellent program to capture with. But as long as you have a Windows PC, preferably Windows XP and at least a 1.8 Pentium, then you can capture flawlessly with the built-in Windows AMCAP or AVICAP which can be found in the Windows/System32. Locate it and make a shortcut to your desktop. It will also allow you to view full screen as it captures. Very low resources used this way. Just be very careful not to accidently 'erase' your capture if you have to stop and restart capture. Anytime you stop capture then the easiest thing to do is to immediately re-name the captured video as opposed to changing the capture settings in AMCAP.

I mostly use AMCAP when capturing unattended. Otherwise I capture with DV Rack for it's great control. The fewer programs that you have running on your laptop the more reliable your capture will be. And capturing with NLE's will hog your laptops' resources and possibly cause capture errors (depending on your laptop speed, memmory and configuration).

Hope that helps.
 
Thanks to everyone for your feedback and ideas.

Looks like DV Rack with a high spec windows laptop is the way to go. The new HDV option, gives a High Def future (when I can afford the new camera).

Thanks again, much appreciated

Phil
 
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