[Shaun Stuart]

Sorry for the lengthy post but I am new to this and did not know where else to ask.

I am trying to copy some holiday film footage from my Canon MV200 digital camcorder to my pc. I am using windows media encoder series 9 but keep running in to problems.

The camera is connected to my PC with the DV out cable and begins to record without problem - unfortunatley when recording anything over 10 minutes the program seems to fail.

During encoding the windows media encoder input panel displays the video working fine up until around 10 to 15 minutes into the film - this varies depending on the quality of the ouput file I choose - the higher the quality (DVD for example) the quicker It seems to run into problems. The input window just stops (displays a paused/still image) as does the audio display. If I ignore this the programme seems to run on forever (Im talking hours) until I stop encoding. If I manually stop encoding I get mixed results. In most cases the program has actually encoded some of the file but the length varies and doesnt seem to have any correlation with where the encoder programme stopped (shown on the input window). During playback of these files I cant select to play from anywhere (cant skip to the middle for example) it will only play from the start.

MY PC runs XP home edition, has an Intel 2.4 pentium processor, 1gb of RAM and 120 gb hardrive (2 x60gb) I believe it has an Nvidia GEforce Ti 4200 128mb graphics card (you can tell Im new to this stuff).

Am I doing something wrong ? Is my system to slow to handle this ? Should I be looking at other software ? I thought that putting my home video collection on to my PC was supposed to be easy!

[Shaun Stuart]

Sorry for the lengthy post but I am new to this and did not know where else to ask.

I am trying to copy some holiday film footage from my Canon MV200 digital camcorder to my pc. I am using windows media encoder series 9 but keep running in to problems.

The camera is connected to my PC with the DV out cable and begins to record without problem - unfortunatley when recording anything over 10 minutes the program seems to fail.

During encoding the windows media encoder input panel displays the video working fine up until around 10 to 15 minutes into the film - this varies depending on the quality of the ouput file I choose - the higher the quality (DVD for example) the quicker It seems to run into problems. The input window just stops (displays a paused/still image) as does the audio display. If I ignore this the programme seems to run on forever (Im talking hours) until I stop encoding. If I manually stop encoding I get mixed results. In most cases the program has actually encoded some of the file but the length varies and doesnt seem to have any correlation with where the encoder programme stopped (shown on the input window). During playback of these files I cant select to play from anywhere (cant skip to the middle for example) it will only play from the start.

MY PC runs XP home edition, has an Intel 2.4 pentium processor, 1gb of RAM and 120 gb hardrive (2 x60gb) I believe it has an Nvidia GEforce Ti 4200 128mb graphics card (you can tell Im new to this stuff).

Am I doing something wrong ? Is my system to slow to handle this ? Should I be looking at other software ? I thought that putting my home video collection on to my PC was supposed to be easy!

[Suhit Gupta]

It sounds like the hardware you have should handle this just fine. The problem appears to be a buffering one IMO. Are your 60GB drives partitioned or does Windows see them as one drive. In either case, do you have enough space? And if so, perhaps you should go into your Encoder settings and see what the buffering settings are.

Suhit

[Lee Yuan Sheng]

Hmm, sorry if this sounds stupid, but isn't it better to copy the video over first then encode (assuming you have enough space first)?

[vcneophyte]

Originally Posted by Lee Yuan Sheng

Hmm, sorry if this sounds stupid, but isn't it better to copy the video over first then encode (assuming you have enough space first)?

I would have to agree. If you are planning to edit your video (and you should be planning to do that) then you should be capturing it into an editing suite, and then compressing it only after you have finished editing it into something interesting to view.