How do I stop PRE7 from pausing during ADVC300 capture?

[Neale]

Hello, here is a question I asked in the Adobe PRE forum. Steve suggested posting here -

You may want to post on the Muvipix.com community forum with this issue. There are a couple of folks over there who really know their stuff, when it comes to DV bridges

I've now got a ADVC300 bridge and it works fine with PRE7. But while converting some home VHS videos PRE7 automatically pauses (i.e. stops recording) where there are a few seconds of blank or noisy footage between clips.

Is there a setting (either on unit or in PRE) where this can be configured? For example to set thirty seconds blank footage before stop. In PRE I've tried 'Device control with DV/HDV Device Control' and 'None' (with 'None' nothing was recognised). On the unit none of the dip switches look relevant.

[Steve Grisetti]

Glad you found your way over here, Neale!

Meantime, as noted in the Adobe posts, Neale has unchecked all options having to do with timecode -- He's turned off scene detect and unchecked the options to report or stop capture on dropped frames.

[Chuck Engels]

All of the capture software that I know of has a time out. It might be 3 seconds or 5 seconds but they all have one. That is to protect you from filling up your hard drive with files of nothing.
When the capture software senses no feed for a certain amount of time it will stop the capture, that is normal. Don't know that you can change the setting or turn it off.

The only thing I know you can do is to watch the capture and start and stop manually.

[Neale]

When the capture software senses no feed for a certain amount of time it will stop the capture, that is normal. Don't know that you can change the setting or turn it off. The only thing I know you can do is to watch the capture and start and stop manually.

That's annoying - not being able to change the setting. I was keen to set it running and leave it doing it's thing until complete.

[Dave McElderry]

Chuck, I can certainly see that that would be true if you had a gap in a DV capture from a camcorder, but are you sure that this should be happening when using the ADVC 300? I've used my 300 for some pretty messed up VHS tapes and I don't recall ever having PrEl stop in the middle. I always attributed that success to the TBC, and thought that no matter what happens on the VHS tape PrEl should continue to receive the timecode. But maybe that's not true.

Neale, can you post your 300 switch settings? Maybe something's in the wrong postion. I can compare to mine.

[Chuck Engels]

Dave is right, I was thinking of capture from a DV Camcorder and having blank sections of tape. That will time out, but the digital converter should not do that. My Pyro doesn't do that either. Like Dave suggests, post your switch settings so he can compare them to his.

[Neale]

Except for switch 6 on selector 1 (sets format to PAL) all switches are off for both Selector 1 & Selector 2. I did try putting Selector 1 Switch 8 to control from the PC but that made no difference.

I've tried importing the tape with PRE7, Magix Movies on DVD 7 and Scenalyzer 4. All of them stop at the same places on the tapes.

Unfortunately the camcorder died many years ago and its make / model are not known. But could a VHS created from an old digital camcorder (this particular VHS includes footage from 1995 -1997) have included a stop code from the original camcorder tape?

Scenalyzer 4 was able to do continuous recording if the 'Stop-Timer' was set. WinDVD copied continuously.

Quite annoying as I would prefer to do capture directly in PRE without needing to sit and watch it waiting for the stops.

[Dave McElderry]

Didn't realize you were "overseas" Neale. I guess I'm "overseas" too, from your perspective.

My settings are the same as yours, except that I'm set for NTSC on switch 6, and switch 5 is set ON for NTSC setup level. I also have switch 8 turned on. I think all that does is allow you to make changes from the Picture Controller software. I don't think we've turned up anything here, but it was worth a try. VHS is an analog format and I don't think there were any codes recorded on the tapes. It's stictly a matter of whether there's a good signal coming off of the tape or not. Steve says you've already taken care of the obvious things in the program, so I'm at a loss. If you have a lot of these tapes to do I do understand not wanting to sit through them all for the capture. Wish I could be of more assistance.

[Chuck Engels]

An email to Canopus support may be in order, or Paul will probably be around before long. He has used a Canopus unit for quite some time, is in the UK and may know the answer

http://www.grassvalley.com/support/contact

[Neale]

I've successfully imported another tape without problem - including around thirty seconds of black frames at start & finish. So I'm hoping the problem is specific to the tape (perhaps a tracking problem). I'll try more imports at the weekend and see what happens.

For the problem tape I've used WinDV to import as DV-AVI/2 and then added them into the project.

[Dave McElderry]

Best of luck Neale. Keep us posted.

[Chuck Engels]

Sounds like things are working ok for now, do keep us informed of your progress Neale

[Neale]

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice

The VHS tape that worked perfectly was created from 8mm film from 1959/1960. When I tried another VHS tape created from 1990's camcorder footage I got the same stopping problem.

My Sony VCR has a feature where each new recording on a tape is given an index mark. I can then FFwd to the next index point. All I can think of is that, even though the VHS was not created on my VCR, something on the tape makes my VCR log an 'index point reached' and the ADVC300 treats this as a 'stop'.

But I find this assumption unsatisfactory as it seems so unlikely. Unfortunately I don't have another VCR to try these tapes with.

Ah well - I'll have to do it all through WinDV. Anyone know of a simple lossless editor just to trim unwanted footage from the end of a DV-AVI?