DV capture with Nero Video is disabled, how to fix it

Hello!

I just wanted to share this to help others in the same situation. I had to transfer (capture) some miniDV tapes in my computer and archive the videos in a hard disk so we can watch them without using the camera. I connected the miniDV camera with Firewire cable (aka IEEE 1394a or iLink) to my DV capture card. First I tried to use the original VirtualDub (latest version 1.10.4). It could access the camera fine and record the video as long as I manually rewind each tape and pressed play to begin playback. Not really convenient. From Video -> Capture Filter I could open a window called "Digital VCR Control" that allowed me to control the camera, but could not start capture automatically when I clicked on the Play button. With this window active on the foreground I could not use the main VirtualDub capture window to manually start capture. If I first clicked on Play to start playback and closed the window I missed the start of the movie. So you either have to manually control the camera like a plain VCR or VirtualDub is not suitable for DV capture. The new advanced version VirtualDub2 has exactly the same issue. Searching at the internet I found an old utility called WinDV that does exactly that, captures DVD video. But this utility could not connect to my camera because I have more than two capture devices in my system (DV, analog video grabber and HDMI capture cards) and is capable of connecting to 2 devices maximum. Trying to connect to the DV capture device connected to the analog video grabber instead and produced an error than no DV device was found.

Finally I used Nero Video to access the DV camera. This can both control the camera and capture the DV video. Upon clicking on the record button the camera starts playback automatically and stops automatically when the end of video data is detected, so no editing to crop start/end of video is required after capture. I was given the choice of "Type 1" or "Type 2" capture. A quick Google search reveals that type 1 has the audio data interleaved with the video in a single stream while type 2 has two separate streams, both types copy the original quality from the camera, they don't reencode. Since type 2 is more compatible with most editing applications, I chose type 2 and captured my first tape. Next day when I launched Nero Video again I was surprised to see that all the controls of the camera and the record button were disabled (greyed). To save you time if you have the same situation, the cause was because Nero Video could not initialize the DV capture device when "Type 2" is selected. To fix this, first change the selection to "Type 1", then change the capture device to something else and then select the DV capture device again. This will restore full functionality and then you may change to "Type 2" before capturing.

I hope that helps.

PS: If you don't have Nero Video an alternative is the AVCutty utility: AVCutty 3.7 Free Download - VideoHelp