Transferring Digital Video

I have been helping my friend John spec out a new computer with the primary goal of having something fast enough for digital video editing. His son Ryan (not the brainiac who answered the Riddle) is a very good wrestler, and John uses the videos to archive Ryan's season as well as as a coaching tool.

Transfer of digital video should be fairly straightforward ... plug the camera into the firewire/1394 port, use a program like Windows movie maker, Sonic DVD, or Adobe Premiere elements to transfer the video. However, on his current machine, the transfer would start to dropped frames after about 4 minutes so he has to transfer things in very small segments which can be a PITA.

So, I ran a series of experiments on my machines of various speeds to determine what is best combo for video transfer without dropping frames. in all test scenarios, I shutdown all extra programs and services like Norton antivirus, realplayer, etc. On a dual core P4 with 1.5 gb of ram, 2 SATA HDs (one for the OS and one for the transfer), I was able to transfer 50 minutes of video with about 200 to 600 dropped frames. It was random when the drops happened but I am guessing it has something to to with HD access on the SATA channels. I switched the transfer HD to an external USB 2.0 HD and transferred the entire 50 minutes without a single dropped frame. Woohoo!!!

For these experiments and for future use, I highly recommend winDV to transfer your video. The program is tiny (less than 100kb) and it does one thing and does it very well (transfer digital video). This minimizes the software footprint on the computer's RAM and therefore gives more room for the transfer itself. Once on your computer, you can use any editing program you wish. Last, this link has some very helpful hints.