-
Mini DV Tapes to Premiere CC
hi looking to import a bunch of mini DV tapes into premiere. can anyone recommend a capture device/workflow? i bought an old panasonic camcorder but my edit mac wold not recognize the device for transfer/capture. are some camcorders better than others?
thanks.
-
5 Replies
-
Had an opportunity last week to dust off some MiniDV tapes of old to use for a project. I was fearful after reading many posts such as yours over the last few years, sure that Firewire tape ingest was deprecated so much in Premiere that it just wouldn’t be possible. Lo and behold, I pulled out our cheap old JVC camera which we had kept after selling off all of our decks, plugged it in and started ingesting like the old days! Premiere saw the camera and had full controlled of it.
Now, we’re Windows based, and I’ve noticed that many of the Firewire connectivity issues I’ve read about were on Mac’s, so….
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
I regularly ingest MiniDV tapes via Firewire using Premiere CC “2013” and 2014. On a MacBookPro running OS 10.8.4. Don’t know if more recent CC versions will do this.
Robert Withers
Independent/personal/avant-garde cinema, New York City
-
DV camcorders generally use FireWire (aka IEEE 1394) ports and a special DV-specific protocol to transfer video and Macs started dumping FireWire around 2008. I can only assume you’re using a Mac that doesn’t have a true FireWire port. You can’t stream DV through an adapter meant to connect storage devices; the protocols are completely different and won’t translate. You need a real FireWire port to connect an old DV camcorder to a computer. Are you using some sort of an adapter? Some DV cams come with USB ports as well but they can’t be used for transferring DV tape info to the computer; usually those cams have an SD card slot and the USB interface allows reading the SD card only.
Premiere Pro still has a Capture facility which can be used to handle DV camcorders. On the PC simply hitting F5 will bring up the Capture panel. Also remember that the camera has to be ON and usually in the PLAY mode rather than RECORD mode to be usable by the computer. I did a capture a few months ago from an old Canon ZR200 camcorder using a FireWire port on a PC and Premiere CC 2017 with only minor issues related to unwisely using LP mode to record and having the DV transport error out once in a while as a result.
-
Ah right. Apple giveth ports Apple taketh ports away. I can’t remember if my cable from the MiniDV camcorder goes into a Firewire port or a USB port. In any case, I have some drives with both Firewire and USB ports so one could daisy chain to a computer that way.
Robert Withers
Independent/personal/avant-garde cinema, New York City
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up