Transfer back to DV camcorder, video is slow and audio is choppy

M

Mike Snyder

I am a Movie Maker newbie, using the following:

- Windows Movie Maker 2
- Dell laptop (512 MB RAM, PIII processor)
- Sony DCR-TRV22 camcorder
- connecting laptop to camcorder with Firewire PCMCIA card

I shot about 7 minutes of video, and transfered it to WMM no problem.
I did some minor editing (adding titles, transistions, etc.). When I
view the edited video on my laptop it is a little choppy but OK
overall. I then transfered the edited movie back to the DV Camcorder
using "Save Movie -> DV Camera". This process took about 30-40
minutes. When I played back the finished video on my DV camera the
video is slow and the audio is so choppy it is inaudible.

Can anyone help me out?

My real goal is to get my WMM file (with titles and transistions) to a
VCR tape so I can send it to my in-laws. Any other suggestions would
be appreciated!

Thanks in advance.
Mike
 
S

Stacey Campbell

When I played back the finished video on my DV camera the
video is slow and the audio is so choppy it is inaudible.

I've spent only a limited amount of time using Movie Maker but it would
appear to be a fairly fragile application. My strategy has become to
ask the least reasonably possible of the app in order to get where I
want. E.g. I had about 90 minutes of PAL DV with tons of cuts and
just a couple video effects that I wanted to save out as NTSC DV. It
turns out this is beyond what Movie Maker can handle on my XP box.
However I could get the file saved out as NTSC DV if I save it out
first as one mondo PAL DV file (which has all the cuts and transitions
fully rendered at save time), then load the PAL back in as a single
clip, then save it back out as NTSC DV.

So, I'd recommend you try:

1. Save out your DV as a DV movie file (this will cause Movie
Maker to render all your effects, titles, cuts etc). Hope you've
got enough disk space for two copies of your movie...

2. Close Movie Maker (I think it's got a pretty bad memory leak).

3. Start up Movie Maker with a new empty project.

4. Drag and drop the saved file into the timeline.

5. Try and save as DV to your camera.

Theoretically since Movie Maker now isn't trying to do two things at
once (i.e. process your cuts, titles, etc _and_ send DV up the wire)
you have a better chance of success.

In terms of what computing power is required to send DV up a firewire
cable to a camcorder, I can say that I'm running a 4 year old AMD K6
300MHz Redhat Linux box which can _just_ get DV off a disk and up the
wire. To do so I have to run the machine in single user mode, which I
guess makes it look a bit like a Windows box. :)

Stacey
 

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