Importing your HDV footage

After capturing your footage with your Canons HV20/HV30/HV40, it is time to import it to your computer and begin some editing. Just before you start, be sure you have enough hard drive space; 1 hour of HDV footage is around 12GB!

One of the easiest way of doing this is by using a free software called HDV Split. Once downloaded, it requires no installation. Just open the software, plug the FireWire in your camera and computer, and turn the camera to play mode. The software will indicate that it has detected the camera.

If the software doesn’t recognise your camera, try installing the drivers for it or just turn off the camera, replug the FireWire and put the camera to play mode (not rec). Once that is done, here is what you must do:

1) Enter a file name for the clip that will be captured

2) Click on Output directory and select where you want to save your clip. If you have more than one hard drive on your computer, select the one that doesn’t have your Operating System. This will reduce chances of having dropped frames. If you don’t have a second internal hard drive, I suggest you buy one, because you will soon need more storage space. In any case, NEVER capture to an external USB Hard Drive!

3) Select if you want Scenes split. What it does, is that it cuts your video in scenes, depending on when you paused or stopped your recording. I usually don’t split scenes, but that is because I have a powerful computer. If you don’t have the RAM and CPU power, use Scenes split, otherwise you will have issues importing 12GB files in your editing software.

4) If you want to preview the file, check the Preview option and select a Frame size. The frame size is the size of the pop-up window that will display the preview. 1/16 means it will be a 16^th of the source video. I don’t recommend using the preview option, unless needed. This could cause dropped frames.

5) If you want HDV Split to stop the capture process once a frame is dropped, you can check the Stop capture on dropped packets\frames. Dropped frames are missing frames. For example, if you are filming at 24 frames per second and encounter a dropped frame, a part of your video could have some missing frames resulting in an image jump or blink. If you choose not to enable this option, HDV Split will still display a warning message if ever it encounters a drooped frame, this way you are aware that you might have to do some post-production on the footage.

6) It’s now time to import. Make sure you did a rewind on your tape! Now press the red button. Don’t worry you won’t record over your tape. Frankly, they should change this button to something more user friendly.

Very important: when capturing starts, do not use any demanding software or game. This will cause dropped frames! Go out, take a coffee and come back. The import process takes as much time as the duration of your footage. 1 hour of footage = 1 hour of import. Even if you have the most powerful computer on the planet, it won’t affect the duration. Don’t you love tape?!

So once the importing process is done, you will have an m2t (MPEG-2) file. Your computer won’t like you as much because MPEG-2 files are highly compressed, meaning your computer must decompress it when you edit the video. If you want to preview your file, you will need the MPEG-2 codec installed.  I recommend downloading VLC. This is a perfect little player that will play all kinds of video and audio formats. On top of that, it’s free!