hot damn! it works!

[topaz]

When Morgan was born, my parents bought us a Hitachi 8mm camcorder to make sure we would have lots of opportunities to bore them to tears with home movies.  Well, the years have gone by and Old Paint has developed a rattling, grinding noise in the motor that actually gets recorded on tape whenever you're taking a movie, so we haven't been using it much the last few years.

So last Christmas I bought Ellen (read: me) a new camcorder, a Sony Mini-DV gadget.  The thing that really appealed to my inner frustrated film geek, of course, was having a video camera with Firewire output so we could actually edit the movies and possibly make them a little more interesting, or hopefully at least less boring.

My parents are celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary all summer this year, and last weekend held a little family reunion.  Great excuse to bring the camera!  I caught as much tape as I could get of our cousins, aunts and uncles reminiscing about growing up with Mom & Dad.  Lots of fun.

But this is all precursor.  The point is that I still don't know how I'm going to get the footage off the camera!  I didn't even have the right kind of Firewire cable until this week.  My options are really to download the video onto Ellen's iBook or my Dell, which is running Linux.  The iBook is far and away the most obvious and sensible choice for anything like this, but the prospect of negotiating with Ellen for a time-share on her laptop so I could edit video seemed.... unappealing. :-)  I could try copying it to my machine, I guess, but.... editing video?  on Linux?

So imagine my surprise when, upon installing the first video editing package I could find, Kino, that It All Just Works.  I had to run Kino as root, and I had to check a FAQ to remind me that it was important to put the camcorder in Play/VCR mode, but after that it just did the right thing.  Hitting the rewind button on the application told the camera to rewind, and hitting "Capture" made it start to pull video off the camera and save it to disk.

Of course, 5 minutes of video expands to the better part of a gigabyte of data in raw DV format.  Now I'm going to need another disk.... :-)

Comments

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

Be careful with that thing's DRM - it may bite you if you ever need to restore from backup onto a different computer. No, really.

The way you pulled it off sounds like two conversions - D-A-D (isn't that cute!) - so you will be free of having to deal with DRM on your own content. I'd say keep doing it that way unless you're sure how to deal with moving the database of DRM keys around.

An anthropologist I know lost a year of raw fieldwork data thanks to having to restore audio recordings made on a Sony minidisc recorder from backup. The database didn't get backed up - Sony informed him he now was the proud owner of a mound of keyless, encrypted data.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Good heavens, DRM hadn't even occurred to me. My understanding is that the video is recorded digitally on the tape (i.e. "DV"), and the Firewire interface is a straight digital transfer, so I thought it was fully digital all the way from beginning to end.

I didn't have to do any explicit fiddling with DRM keys in order to get video off of the camera, and I didn't use any of Sony's software, so I can't figure out where the DRM would be implemented here. I did some google searches for "sony minidv drm" and didn't turn up any indication that DRM is an issue with MiniDV -- if you know of any specific pointers I should be looking at I'd appreciate it. :-/

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

Have fun! I had mentioned (http://pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com/90037.html) just getting yet another external drive myself, and will definitely be doing more editing this weekend.

DRM

[(Anonymous)]

Hi, I am lead developer of Kino. I am glad it worked well for you. You do not need to worry at all about DRM; there is none. Also, it is straight digital and no analog conversion in between.

[fraterrisus]

my dad runs way, way in front of me on both the "new storage technologies" and "quantity of available disk space" fronts because he's quite the amateur videographer. :) gobs and gobs (or should i say gigs and gigs?) of disk space. i'll probably pick up my first 100+GB disk right around the time that he tops out 1TB... :)

Re: DRM

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Heh! Well, thanks for dropping by and clearing it up. :-)

It's lovely work! The software really feels very approachable -- I'm a complete novice at film and video editing, and I'm looking forward to learning what it can really do. :-)

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Oh, nifty! So there's a possibility that I could hit you up with my newbie videographer questions? :-)

What platform are you doing your work on, btw?

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

Ask away, though as I use Vegas and DVD Architect under Windows things may be somewhat different.