Why, you ask, would someone like DarrellH want such a thing? Well, well! I'll just tell you! We have about 14 of these little video camera tapes sitting around our house...
...with lots of (I think) good video of Brendan's first 3 years on them. But, heretofore I haven't been able to do anything with that video except hook up the video camera to a TV and show it that way. That has been done once or twice, but it isn't very effective. For one thing, it is hard to show the good parts and skip the boring parts. I'm a video and photo bug, so I take a lot of both, and have about a 15% rate of "good quality" shots. The rest is just chaff. Hehe.
So, I've wanted to pick out some highlights from our tapes for some time now, and since the new baby is coming, I wanted Jen to be able to put video of him on her blog. All the girls can do that except her and by gosh we're gonna solve that! We tried connecting the camera via the included USB cable a while back, but it SUCKED doing it that way. The USB driver for my camera is worthless and only lets you rip 30 seconds of video at a time. Now what am I going to do with a measly 30 seconds of video? Right...nothing. Firewire is definitely the way to go for digital video.
Anyway, I got the Sabrent card at NewEgg. I had heard that they were good, but hadn't ever ordered from them. They didn't have the lowest, lowest price, but their shipping cost was good so I went with them. The card was $16.99 and, much to my surprise, came with a 6 pin to 4 pin firewire cable - exactly the one I needed. I expected to have to pay about 40 bucks for the card and then another 20 for the cable, so getting the whole enchilada for $21.98 (after shipping) was a great deal!!!
I have installed it, connected the camera to AC power so as not to waste battery, and also connected the firewire cable. The PC instantly recognized both the new adapter and the Panasonic PV-DV102, so that really made me happy. I was all prepared for a fight to get them to work.
I used Adobe Premiere Pro to get the video and it worked like a charm! I extracted 1:36 seconds of test footage to the computer that I had taken on a new tape. I didn't want to start off with one of our original tapes just because I didn't know how the process worked. I didn't want to run the risk of messing up an irreplaceable tape, you see, so I shot something that I could play with just for this project.
It worked great! Premiere took just what I told it to and saved it as a 357 Meg AVI. I like AVI and MPEG for my videos just because I want a more standard format than quicktime or WMV. Anyway, I played with that a bit in Premiere. I lightened it up since it was kind of dark. That worked, but when I encoded it to MPEG, it has a couple glitches early on. I worked on that for about 40 minutes, and finally gave up. I don't know why it is doing that.
Just for fun, I imported the dark original clip into Windows Movie Maker I love that program because it is soooooo simple to use. I used it for our Christmas Lights Video, in fact. I made a video just short of 2 minutes and uploaded it to YouTube.
Check it out! More to come...especially when the new little guy appears on the scene sometime in about the next 10 days or so.
1 comment:
Thanks!!!!!!!!!! :) More to come.
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