Capturing 3 DV-Camcorders at once to harddisk with live-picture ?

[Mike Cohen]

I have heard you cannot have more than one DV device at a time.
This company makes a product which can record 4 streams of video at once – however I think they are using an analog capture card
https://www.winnov.com/

[Blast1]

I do three DV streams with Canopus’s Storm 2 DVcapture function(1 on the storm, 2 on a F/W), Some people say you can also do it with Scenalyzer(Haven’t tried it myself though) by opening a new program for each stream, in either case you need a firewire card that has separate addressable ports like a Pyro, some other cards have three connectors on them but they are acting like a hub

[Blast1]

Darn thing sent my post before I was finished, These streams are to disk not for live switching, if you want live switching also I think New-Tek does something like that.

[Vince Becquiot]

I’ ve done 2 at the same time with Scenalyzer. It works, but you ‘ll to make sure that you are using a rock solid machine for 3 of them. I also wouldn’t recommend it as primary means for capturing live footage. That’s asking for a production disaster, and a new career 😉

Vince

[Michael Pekic]

@Vincent
which version of Scenalyzer, Computer System and Disc-Subsystem did you use for your 2-Camera project ? To be sure: you captured both signals on one computer, sin’t it ? if yes, which firewire setup did you run ?

[Vince Becquiot]

It’s been a while, and it might have been a 3.x version, I would shoot them an email to confirm that it’s supported in 4.0. And of course multiple channels of firewire.

Vince

[Blast1]

[Vincent Becquiot] “‘ll to make sure that you are using a rock solid machine for 3 of them”

I do three with Canopus Storm with no problems, One on the Storm and two on firewire with a P-IV 3.2ghz with Sata drives, With Scenanlyzer ver4.0 I’ve done two live, put both cams the firewire turn them on one at a time, windows should recognize them then open Scenalyzer, there should be two “Microsoft DV Camera and VCR”, one will have #2 added to the description, select the first one, if you have one screen adj the Scenalyzer decktop to half the screen, then open another Scenalyzer adj the size and select the #2 cam, capture at will, iusually capture to two different SATA drives, also have done it with a laptop with a express card sata.

[Vince Becquiot]

Sorry, I truncated my answer a little. It was my company’s editing system, and I honestly can’t recall with card was in there.

Drives were just 7200rpm, setup for one capture per drive, plus the OS, so 3 drives total. If I recall it was on a Dell 2.8 Gig P4 with 2 gigs of ram, it was a back up capture system, and we DID get a few dropped frames.

Vince

[Scott Jensen]

Have you tried capturing more than one HDV stream? I would think this would take even more processor power…maybe a dual or quad core machine? Even if I had two HDV cams I’m sure my single 1.4ghz p4 would not handle it.

[Blast1]

Since HDV on tape is basically the same data rate as DV any computer that can capture two or more DV should be able to do the same with HDV if the software is available, however alot more horsepower will be needed to process the HDV unless using a intermediate codec.