Adding timestamps when capturing with S-video?
 

Hi!

Hope you all are having great holidays!

The biggest benefit, other than being easy to transfer, with capturing (transferring) DV through firewire from my Sony DCR-TRV50E is getting the correct timestamps in the filenames and in the metadata. That for me is a feature that is worth a lot.

Now that I'm considering using the S-video and purchasing a good capturing card instead, to get the best possible quality for archival storage, I wonder if you have any suggestion for workflow and getting these timestamps into the metadata?
I am almost considering adding the time and date as a watermark, like the old days.

Best regards

Or...:hmm: Could the original timecode/timestamp be exported as a textfile and converted to .srt? And perhaps embed that in the avi-container?

The best quality for a digital8 tape is the firewire transfer. It's a file copy operation off the tape as it's digital already. Don't capture miniDV or Digital8 via s-video.

If you're getting correct recorded-at timestamps, then you're indeed looking at a D8 tape.

No, Transferring DV via firewire is the best option, Using S-Video capturing your workflow is like this:
DV -> DV Decoding -> Digital to analog conversion -> S-Video -> Analog to digital conversion -> USB -> Digital file on HDD.
While transferring via firewire is like this:
DV -> Firewire -> DV file on HDD.

Oh and no one wants to see a hard coded timeline or date throughout the entire video, Idiots back in the day left the time stamp on video the whole time because they didn't know how to set it to show up for few seconds and disappear.

is mainly for purposes of evidence. As noted above firewire transfer is the lossless way to move DV/D8 video from tape to a PC. The only exception might be where the player is able to correct tape read errors that otherwise would cause a firewire transfer to fail.

Conversion from DV format to a lossless intermediate format can be accomplished in the editing/restoration process.

Tape read errors has nothing to do with the output connection, They will still occur over analog connection. The only case I see is if the firewire port of the camcorder is broken or there is no availability of firewire port on the computer otherwise there is absolutely no advantage transferring a digital taper over an analog connection.
I didn't see that the OP expresses having time code for evidence purposes, Maybe I miss understood his post.

Not accurate. The DV transfer can miss seconds of footage. This doesn't matter if the shooting was properly started. But when footage is badly shot, recording started too late, seconds can matter. Analog is the way to recover those seconds.

This has never happened to me, I have only read it from you, I could not find any other person complained about it as far as I can remember, Also WinDV don't have precise control of the tape transport like SClive does, Sclive is frame accurate, it starts the capture at the very first active frame and never misses one.

Oh, it happens.
- Most people do not post, just read.
- Some are afraid, ashamed, whatever, so only mention it in private conversations.
- Offline conversations.

It somewhat depends on the camera, and the tapes. You may never see it, or always see it, depending on factors.

It can be the difference between grandma saying
"Happy birthday to you!"
vs.
"you!"

Lousy home recordings, poor start of the recording. It was common enough to happen, but not too frequently.

It might depend on the application used to capture too, how it deals with very corrupted/damaged dv frames.