Is MiniDV Capture by firewire possible in Resolve??

I have gone the indirect Premiere Pro CS6 route and got that working with a Sony FX1. The files brought into Resolve 16 play okay but the audio on the exports fails sync as in one-thousand--two-thousand--three-thousand----gone.

Any advice will be appreciated, especially in managing to find the appropriate settings. I could only find HD settings offered but MiniDV PAL may be buried in there somewhere. I have about 50 hours of oral history related to the WW2 Timor campaign to digitise before the tapes lay down and their contents are lost.

Cheers.

Get a Mac (any old one will be good) and FCP-7 to transfer and then convert it all to ProRes 422.

Since some of those tapes may already have dropouts, you'll need to set in and out points for the good parts on the tape before trying to transfer. FCP will do its best to sync the audio then (and keep your fingers crossed).

I went through this a few years ago.

I've used Virtualdub with success lately on an old Thinkpad that had a firewire port, the problem was the drivers in windows 10, after some research I ended up using legacy drivers from a third party and not the windows drivers which didn't work. I think I was capturing avi interlaced, but I'll have to check that, anyway the end result was what to be expected, from DV and HDV tapes.

Thank you everyone for your responses.

With the captures in Premiere I did observe that the saved file is an .avi not a .m2t so it is converting on the fly. Munted captures were an issue when capturing and converting on the fly with the old cineform products. For reliability one had to capture a m2t file then convert to .avi or .mov in a separate task.

AVI or MOV are just containers. DV can exist in them without conversion, but DR can’t read them.

I read up a bit on MiniDV and although the media is different than on Digital8 (different Cassettes), the format of the Recording seems to be the same. It is all DV, either NTSC or PAL.

I have a Digital8 / D8 Camcorder and am grabbing all the data also via Firewire under Windows. I use WinDV or Scenalyzer Live (both are free) to copy the Data from the Tapes to my PC. Then I start Resolve and just load the files into the Media Library and start cutting.

It all works flawless.
So if your main problem is getting the data from your Camcorder to your PC: Yes, use Firewire and use either WinDV or Scenalyzer live. Unless there is nothing special / different from D8 other than the cassette format, it should work for you too.

The TO has audio sync problems, which I have also seen when just transferring the tapes with one of the simple tools.
That's why I recommended FCP 7, which can re-sync to some degree if you don't just transfer the whole tape, but set in and out points for any consistent recording on the tape.

I ended up going the Premiere Pro CS6 route and the new Chinese firewire card died on its bum after 2 hours and 20 minutes of oral histories as .avi files. They all held sync. In Resolve it remains one-thousand--two-thousand--three-thousand ----gone. It is likely due to my mismanagement as I am still a learner driver with Resolve. At about $7 per hour of successful capture time I should be grateful. I guess the demise of the firewire card was another little increment of Xi Jinping's revenge against Australia for getting uppity. I should count my blessings that the card did not take down the firewire ports of the Sony DV deck and Sony camera while it was exiting. It got quite warm.

Convert your clips with a tool like Shutter Encoder into a modern mezzanine codec (like Cineform or DNxHD and try to import the results.

That’s not good! My cheap firewire card has been doing well but now I have something else to worry about. I am on a very similar journey at the moment, working with precious old MiniDV tapes.

The answer to your original question is that Resolve cannot capture MiniDV but that is not really a problem. If your main objective is to preserve the original material, then separating the capture part of the process from everything else works well and is pretty straight forward. Strictly speaking you don’t need to digitise it because it is already saved on the tape in a digital format. The firewire capture copies the digital material from the tape to a computer file without altering it. On a windows PC this will be a DV-AVI file, so Premiere was working correctly and wasn’t converting it to anything on the fly. I have read that some people have had issues capturing MiniDV using Premiere, so it may be best to use something else for this part. I use WinDV (as suggested by pbuedi). It is free, simple to use and I have just transferred 50+ tapes with no issues.

I have enjoyed using Resolve with modern HD footage but I have realised that it is not ideal for MiniDV. If you edit DV in Premiere you can export the results in the DV AVI format. If you do this Premiere will only render parts that have been altered (transitions, colour corrections etc.) but will use the original clips for everything that hasn’t changed, so it keeps the full original quality. Unfortunately Resolve is unable to do this because it cannot export in the DV format. In fact, if I could pick up a cheap copy of CS6, I would buy it for MiniDV editing alone. If I needed the tools in Resolve I would then import the edited file but it would have to be exported in another format, which is when it starts to get messy. I am still struggling to work out the best export formats for PAL SD...

Graham Thomas.

It sees that keeping everything fastidiously in the DV PAL realm in Premiere and in Resolve 16 seems to be the secret.

There is not much wriggle room with old Canon XL1 footage which was allowed to blow out a bit. It can be as sharp as you like as long as it is dead soft yet when it first came out the camera was the duck's guts.

We have been spoiled by disruptive progress haven't we.

That clip has great character (and characters). I’d like to see more of the story.

We all use the best gear we have at the time. It looks a lot better than the Video8 stuff I was looking at earlier, which was shot with the camera I had available on the day.

I had an issue with DR 17 messing up colours when exporting PAL MiniDV. I rolled back to 16 and it’s fine, so stick with 16 if you use Resolve with those tapes.


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Graham Thomas.

It is most definitely a compelling topic. The originator of the filmed material, Steve Rice heard Paddy Keneally was travelling to Timor so upped sticks and went there with him and an assistant.

Paddy Keneally was talking about the poor treatment postwar of the Timorese by Australia. The Australians who fought an assymetric war with the Japanese on Timor would not have survived except for the Timorese people and especially the "criados", assistants who volunteered to carry stuff for them and scout for them.

They were thought to have been killed or captured by the Japanese as another two special units had been. After some months, one of their number who had been a radio tech for the ABC built a shortwave transceiver out of stolen and donated parts plus a stolen Japanese battery and re-established contact with Darwin. The radio is in the AWM museum.

When the Australians were eventually evacuated, they wanted to take their criados with them. They were surely doomed if the Japanese got hold of them but they were forced to leave them at the beach.

Steve Rice is preparing to write a feature film script, a story which although documented in several books and given some media coverage is largely untold.

The campaign on Timor is apparently still used as a reference taught to modern SAS recruits. Just a few hundred Australian commandos effectively hobbled about 20,000 Japanese soldiers' worth of war effort by the Japanese needing to keep them in Timor to fight the Australians.

After the Australians left, the Timorese suffered very many lives lost at the hands of the Japanese in reprisals. Then with Australia's blessing came the Indonesians who took their harvest of lives in their turn.

If you want to know more generally, look up "Double Red Diamonds" on the internet.