Record direct to Hard Drive - comments requested

[jeffterm]

My apologies up front if I’m reliving an earlier conversation, but I could not find it.

I am going to be recording a play that is about 1 ½ hours. The problem is that the writer/director decided to make it a straight through production without any intermission or even any scene breaks or fade to black, where I could quickly change tapes. After playing around last night trying to record directly to Premiere, which doesn’t work, I tried using winDV as a capture utility. It does work. I was recording Sony HC1 direct through firewire to winDV on my editing computer. Other than a slight delay to my monitor, which should not matter since it will be muted way in the back of the theater, mounted on a tripod. What other issues can I be looking forward to?

Does anyone have any hints or suggestions for trying this? Warnings that I can look out for?

I want to do a long duration test to see if it drops frames after awhile, and just how large a file its going to create after 1 ½ hours.

I also wonder if there is a HDV utility that would allow similar capturing of the HD video direct to hard drive.

Again, anyone have any comments? Suggestions?

Anyone want a mint?

[Steve Grisetti]

Aside from using a hard drive camcorder with a 3-4 hour capacity (and that has its own liabilities), I don't know any. Sorry.

[Gerry]

Here's a suggestion: tape it on two camcorders, mounted cheek-to-cheek.

Start one, let it go for ~55 minutes, and start the other one, so that they 're both recording for the remaining 5 minutes. When you bring it into Premiere Elements, you can do a very quick dissolve between the two files.

[Chuck Engels]

Recording directly to the computer will work just fine, but you don't have tapes to fall back on as a backup if anything happens to the hard drive.
1 1/2 hours will only take up about 20gb of space but make sure you have plenty of extra room on the drive. I don't think you will find any dropouts or problems at all, many live productions record direct to disk.

[jackfalbey]

To capture direct to HD with Premiere Elements 3.0... connect the camcorder via firewire, set "Device Control" to "None" under "Preferences", open a PE project Capture window and click "Get Video". It works with both my budget Sony TRV-460 and prosumer PD170.

[SetiRich]

I record things directly to disc & my biggest issue is the 2gb file limit that seems to occur with any capture program I use. I'm even to the point of using two computers, starting the second 10 minutes after the first, to get the information that seems to missed in the file transition event.

Has anyone found a reliable way of recording larger than 2gb files?

[Chuck Engels]

Convert you disks to NTSF rather than FAT32 which they must be.

[Bob]

FAT supports 2GB files while FAT32 supports 4GB files. NTFS is essentially limited by the size of your disc. So, Chuck is right. Check the file system on your disk and convert to NTFS if possible. There could be other issues, the original specification for AVI only supported 2GB files for example. But, the disk file system is the most likely suspect. If your disk is using NTFS, then you've probably run into one of those other issues.

[Chuck Engels]

Thanks for the additional information Bob, I learn new stuff here all the time

[Andy_E]

I can't believe anyone still has a FAT16 formatted hard drive these days. Still, I believe older AVI 1.0 capture programs had issues with creating file sizes over 2Gb - something to do with the maximum index size. I seem to remember that originally the index limit was the sticking point but an extension to the 1.0 format allowed more data to be appended making 4gb the limit under FAT32 (OS restriction rather than capture program**).

NTFS? we're talking terabytes here....

I guess we've got to ask what are you capturing from, to and via?

**EDIT: actually that may be a AVI 1.0 limit as well (it's all so long ago ). Certainly OpenDML AVI under NTFS the limit is I think 32 terabytes or something like that - and that's a lot of video!

[Bob]

FAT16 is still very much alive in smaller capacity devices. But, I agree you Andy, you're not going to see it much in computer internal drives anymore unless it's an older system or a drive has been moved from an older system. There are still FAT16 and FAT32 drives in use though, and when you have a specific 2GB apparent limitation, without more information, it's still worth a quick and easy check to see whether that's a factor.

There very definitely could be an issue with the capture path, so your "I guess we've got to ask what are you capturing from, to and via?" is very germane.

[sidd finch]

The ATC2K lipstick camcorder that I purchased specifically mentions that the flash card should be set to FAT 16. I have tried using the camcorder with both FAT 16 and FAT 32 but did not notice any difference. The card is 2gb in size.

Sidd

[jeffterm]

Sidd,
Lipstick cam? I thought it was a helmet cam, or did you buy another one I don't know about?

anyone else interested:

Here's where I stand - The file size limit I thought mught be a problem, but I am running NTFS across the board. I'll let you know if anything comes up.
I did some test capture in my office - HC1 direct to PE. Did ilink convert to DV for about 10 minutes worked well enough that I can tell.
I switched over to HDV and tried again, made it to the 7min mark before I got bored taping the cat clean herself.

For recording I had my laptop acting as middle-man between my HC1 -> firewire -> laptop -> USB -> harddrive.
Playback of the HD stuff on the laptop sucked and made me nervous that it was a waste of time. Upon bringing the external drive to my editing computer - it opened up and played / scrolled / edited just fine. I could not find any dropped frames. Which is, I suppose what I am most paranoid about. Well, that, and the whole thing just dropping out and being for nothing.

In the morning, they are having another dress rehersal so I'm going to go and setup to record the duration and see just how much a 250gig external drive can hold.

If anyone is interested in the results: I'll post them.
Jeff

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

Always useful to have results posted - may help someone else.

Re the lipstick cam - tell us more Sidd.

[Briantho]

Is this play just under 1.5 hours? If so, do you have any problem using LP instead of the default SP mode? LP gives you up to 90 mins. I do it all the time on my simple Panasonics. I often film amateur dramatics and operatic stuff and the 'Acts' are typically a bit over the hour - I just use LP with never a problem.