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Problems using Pinnacle hardware to capture VCR footage into Sony Vegas Pro 12.0 64 bit.
Hello,
I’m using Sony Vegas Pro 12.0 64 bit. What I want to do is capture video from a VCR into Sony Vegas. Here’s how I’m currently doing it, and it’s causing me problems within Vegas itself.
I’m using a Dazzle DVC 100, made by Pinnacle, as the hardware for transferring the video from the VCR into Vegas. But Vegas isn’t connecting to the device when I’m using Sony Video Capture, sometimes giving me an error saying that it just simply can’t connect to the device.
For what it’s worth (though I doubt this is important information), I also have Pinnacle Studio version 12.1.
If anyone knows of a solution to my problem using my hardware, or has an alternate way of connecting a VCR into a computer and capturing the playback from it into Vegas, I’d greatly appreciate it.
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1 Reply
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That’s because Vegas is expecting to see a firewire (1394a) connection. That means your PC has to have a firewire card or connector installed. From what I can determine, the Dazzle DVC accepts RCA & S-video inputs, but outputs only via USB, hence why Vegas does not recognise it as a device as such.
If you do have a firewire card and an old DV video camera that accepts an RCA (analog) input and has a firewire connector output (both on the camera body), you can use the camera as a ‘pass-through’ device to convert the analogue input signal from a VCR to a digital video signal via the firewire connection. Vegas will recognise the camera in this case, and all you will need to do is start the VCR, and when you see the video appear in the capture preview window, you can manually start (record) the video stream in Vegas. This method will give you the best possible capture quality. You don’t need to have tape in the camera, and you can record long VHS tapes this way.
Note that some DV cameras that have an analogue input don’t permit pass-through, but all that means is you record to DV tape first ‘in camera’, rewind when you are done, and then playback and capture in Vegas. You are limited to 83 minutes (if you are using Panasonic 83 minute tapes). You might be able to use long play recording on the camera, but that reduces the bit rate and thus, quality.
If you don’t have a firewire connection to do a passthrough, the DVC100 is your best option, but that means you have to use Pinnacle to ‘capture’. If you have an option to capture as AVI, choose that, but be aware it is around 11 GB per hour of video. You can capture as MPEG2, and I would avoid MPEG1.
My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6
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