First, the last two posts to this blog have included a bit of HD video captured to my new MacBook via a piece of hardware I already owned and a terrific little software package that I found courtesy of teh Intarwebs.  The video was captured from my BellTV PVR via a Haupaugge! HD PVR unit, connected via USB 2.0 cable to my MacBook.  I captured the video on my MacBook by way of Steven Toth’s excellent Mac application “HDPVR Capture”.  That setup may have some redundancy built into it – there’s really no reason to have a set top box PVR connected to another device that itself turns a computer into a PVR, really – but I tend to carry my MacBook around with me a lot and it’s not likely to be sitting next to the TV ready to capture whatever television programs I might want to record, so (in my case) it does actually make a little sense from a hardware standpoint.  The hardware configuration is really unimportant, though: the more interesting bit about this is the software package I used to capture the (HD) video to computer.  The Haupagge unit ships (or at least it did when I bought it) with software for Windows-based PCs, but no applications are provided for Mac users.  The Windows-based notebook that I had previously been using to capture video barely fit the minimum specs and it frequently choked on the video capture tasks set for out.  Worse still, the capture process was producing an “m2ts” file on the computer, a file set out in a format (as I understand it) designed to be understood by PVRs, but supported by precious little editing/playback software out there.  The end result was that I found myself struggling to make reliable copies of programs I had recorded, and generally unable to thereafter edit or trim the files (even to do something simple like take out commercials), and unable to archive the files on optical media by burning them to DVDs.

Enter Steven Toth.  Let me say that I don’t know the man and I’m not receiving any compensation from him whatsoever; I am just a very satisifed user of the application he has developed, “HDPVR Capture”.  As I understand it, Mr. Toth knows quite a bit about the Haupaugge device because he’s worked on the inside there;  he knew that the manufacturer was choosing not to support Mac Users, so he filled the void himself and wrote such an application.

My review of this software: It Kicks Ass.  Simply stated, it works.  Easy to install, easy to use, I had it up and running in a matter of moments after my licence key was received via email (there is a demo version available for free download with certain features locked out or restricted, paid licence allows the user to access all features, but the licence is restricted to use with one Haupaugge unit only).

The videos I’ve captured convert easily into .mp4 files, which then import easily into iMovie and may be edited exported like any other captured video, no problem whatsoever.

Second: I have installed a plugin on the site called WPtouch.  The plugin automatically creates a version of the site for iPhones and various other smartphones.  If you have WordPress 2.7 or higher installed, you can install this plugin directly from your admin panel by clicking on the Plugins/Add New link, then typing “WPtouch” in the search box, clicking on the appropriate link when it comes up and following the on-screen instructions that follow thereafter.  The whole installation process took me about three minutes from stem to stern, and – again – it worked like a charm, at least I think.

Would anybody who’s accessing the site from smartphone let me know how the site is functioning for you.  Any thoughts, suggestions as to whether the smartphone specific theme works for you?

• Kid Kadri!!!!1  He’s the real deal, people.  He could use some bulking up, especially up top, but the guy is slick smooth with incredible hand/eye co-ordination and a retinue of subtle moves, little shifts from side to side, slight changes of pace, small stick movements, etc. – that put his opponents off balance and allow him to sift through defenders and to find open space.  I don’t think he’s NHL ready right now, but I would be willing to bet he’ll make the Leafs next year;
• Jesse Blacker has a howitzer for a shot.  That kid is some steady, too.  I was impressed with his play, though he was on the ice for the Penguins’ second goal, scored on a soft little spinerama move on the goalline  by Moon;
• Stalberg and Stefanovich showed lots of promise and combined on the Leafs’ only goal of the evening – basically a short 2 on 0 after a Penguin defender turned it over to Stralberg in the high slot;
• I didn’t notice Bozak and Hanson as much as I thought I might.  I did see Hanson a lot, and he seemed to be playing well positionally, but they didn’t seem to accomplish much.  The power play (which featured these two prominently) was an abomination worthy of an actual big league Maple Leafs power play – it was that bad;
• Dale Mitchell continues to get noticed.  He’s full of energy and plays a smart positional game, especially defensively.  He played on a line with Gilati and Kurtz, and these three were more visible to my eye (especially in the late stages of the game) than Bozak and Hanson (though Stalberg, the third forward on that line, did impress me);
• Andrew Engelage (former goaltender for the Memorial Cup Champion Windsor Spitfires) unfortunately didn’t do much to increase his chances of landing and keeping a big league deal – the Leafs had scored to make it 2-1 and were coming on in a big way and threatening to tie the game midway through the 3rd when Engelage coughed up a Raycroftian hairball and whiffed on Robert Bortuzzo’s weak shot for the 3rd Penguin goal, effectively extinguishing the Maple Leaf comeback attempt.   Too bad for Andrew, I’d like to see him get a shot somewhere.

Here’s a quick mashup of some video I shot at the game.  There are no fancy transitions, ’cause I haven’t figured out how to use that part of my new video editing software yet.  Shown in this video are:

1. A picture of the teams lined up for the national anthems;
2. The Leafs skating out on to the ice for the 3rd period;
3. The Penguins first goal, the one iPhone and I combined to describe on Twitter as a “Quasimodo breakaway” – you gotta love “autocorrect”.  And yes, those people in front of me DO have rather large heads, and yes, I should have used the “zoom” feature.  Thanks for your help;
4. The fight between Slaney and Bortuzzo.  Bombs away, this is truculence;
5. A bit of the play – featuring Bozak, Hanson and Stalberg, if I recall correctly; and
6. Kid Kadri doing some stuff, and then unfortunately getting drilled – he’s the guy taking the draw and wearing number 43.

I’ll take a little closer look at the footage I’ve got on Friday night and see if I can’t cobble together a little something better than this.  In the meantime, enjoy.

I can’t give out a lot of details at the moment, mostly because I don’t want you to steal this gig from me, but rest assured I will be pimping the book like a madman once it has been brought into existence.   As much as you are now staring at the screen, cursing the rotten luck that leaves you bereft of detail, I can promise you that you will someday remember fondly the happy times before this godforsaken book was mentioned by me in every sentence.

I’ll bet you can’t wait to be that unhappy.  In the meantime, I am busy trying to figure out how the hell I am going to manage to get everything done that I will need to:  for example, not only do I now have to find the time to research and write the piece, if I am going to be a writer I also have to make sure that I spend the correct amount of time bellyaching about how making the deadline is going to be a bitch and so on.  I guess this post is a pretty good start on that.  I must be a quick learner.

All kidding aside, I do have some degree of concern about taking on yet another project:  at present, for those of you keeping track, I am (theoretically) in the middle of:

• NaNoReMo2008 – began in November. Supposed to last a month (hey, I figure Dickens is dead, it’s not like he’s waiting for me to finish so he can move on to the next book.  Also, that screaming you hear is coming from San Diego;  Mike, I don’t think there’s any need for the potty mouth….);
• repairing my Sony DCR-HC26 video camera;
• writing, directing and editing a short film for a charitable/educational organization I’m involved with;
• learning how to do 3d graphics and animations using Blender;
• dedicating myself to a program of diet, exercise and general personal health improvement (seriously, stop laughing, it’s not polite);
• learning how to twiddle the various knobs and faders I have at my disposal to make audio recordings of musical compositions;
• figuring out how to make food that pleases both Spouse and my own gaping maw; and
• fooling about with digital photography, basically by doing what Mike tells me to do.

And those are just the projects I’ve blogged about!  I also have it in my mind to convert some old VHS video to digital (I spent a large part of last Saturday wondering why I haven’t yet converted my copy of Leafs/Kings Game 7 in ’93 to an iPod-friendly format so that I can watch it whenever I feel the urge.   This, as much as it may be a cry for help,  is not a lie.)   There are also three or four crates of old vinyl LPs that are practically begging for my attention, so much of my (formerly?) beloved music desperate to enter the 21st century at last.

Anyway, no doubt some of my time tippy-tapping away at my article will take away somewhat from the time I have available to examine my navel here for your benefit;  you must be devastated, I can tell.  I have to say, though, that over the last week or so, I’ve enjoyed spending a few minutes in front of the blank screen with the cursor blinking and a hundred poopy jokes wanting to be written.  I guess I’m having fun writing, and I’ve pushed back a little bit at the multi-armed time-eating monster that my job has recently become.  I have been forcing myself to make just a little bit of time to sit here and flap my virtual gums at you, and it has made me feel a bit better, so I am going to try (see the list of projects above) to keep it up.

Seriously, stop laughing at me.

————

Note:  The Spitfires lost to Brampton last night 4-2.  I recorded the game via Freecorder, loaded it on to my iPod then carefully avoided hearing about the score;  I listened to the game after I went to bed at around 11:30.  About two hours later, I was bummed out – and sleepy.   Anyway, Dad and I won’t be seeing the Spits claim the Championship Trophy tomorrow night in Brampton;  I just hope I haven’t jinxed them too badly.  We want another W!

You may recall that some time back, I mentioned that I was fooling around with a package of 3d modelling software called Blender.   Part of my last vacation hurrah on Saturday and Sunday was to spend some quality time in front of the monitor fiddling about with this little package of digital wonders.  I was greatly assisted in getting back up to speed by a terrific series of tutorials posted on YouTube by super3boy.

The video below is a brief animation I rendered after completing super3boy’s 19th blender tutorial, on the subject of domino physics.   The animation shows a series of “dominoes” set up on a plane;  the first domino falls over and knocks over the next one in sequence, causing a tower of dominoes to crash to the ground.  It was remarkable how simple this was to create.  All it took was some very basic modelling – creating and scaling a mesh cube, really – then copying the “domino” several times and placing it on the plane.   Blender takes care of the rest;  the physics of the virtual world are already coded in the software and all the (ahem) visual artist need do is designate the appropriate objects as “actors” in the scene to be animated.  A brief key sequence starts the “game engine”, which is the piece of software that calculates the physical outcome of the scene you’ve created (in this case, tumbling dominoes) and – last but not least, a command to render the scene into the desired video format.   It took only about five to ten minutes of my interaction with the computer to do this;  the rest was taken care of by the software.  I am flabbergasted.  Blender is also capable of adding textures, lighting and shading effects to all of the objects (none of which are evident in the scene below, as I didn’t take the time to apply these effects), which is to say it’s capable of making the animation look a hell of a lot more realistic than the sequence below.   Right now, I’m just astounded by the ease with which this sequence was created.

I am looking very much forward to using Blender more extensively in some video projects I have germinating in the recesses of my mind.  I am especially anxious to explore the video compositing capabilities of the package, and to combine 3d effects created and rendered in Blender with actual video footage captured from live action cameras.

The offending device

I had no idea how common a problem this seems to be.  Since posting about my struggles with the camera, that post and posts about my adventures with a Craftsman Lawn Tractor seem to have generated an awful lot of traffic to the site.  My camera still isn’t working, but I now think I know why.  It occurred to me that an update might help someone else with similar technical problems teetering on the precipice of a murderous rage.

It would appear that the problem in my particular case is the Firewire (IEEE 1394) port on the side of the camera.  A close examination of the pins inside the port suggests that somehow one or more of the pins that are supposed to make contact with the IEEE 1394 cable have come off.  The port needs to be replaced.

Since the camera warranty is long expired, and I didn’t purchase the extended warranty offered by the retailer, I’m on my own.  When I spoke with folks at the Future Shop about getting repairs done, they suggested that it would make more sense to buy a new camera.  I’m not ready to go that route just yet, partly because this is already my second Mini-DV camera – the first was a JVC model (GL something or other, I think) that stopped functioning consistently just shortly before Spouse and I were married – it has developed the dreaded E04 Safeguard Mode error, which (according to teh Intarwebs) is a common and apparently lethal affliction for JVC camcorders.

The thing is I have a LOT of material on a number of Mini-DV tapes that I need to be able to access.

The immediate solution I’m going to attempt is to replace the port – or the circuit board on which it’s mounted – myself.  Madness, right?  Maybe.  Maybe not – I found the service manual for the camera at servicemanuals.net and – for a fee of about $15 – downloaded a copy.   Now I have a schematic of how the camera comes apart, and (more importantly) how it goes back together.  I plan to study it carefully before attempting the dissassembly. I also need to do a little research to find out how much the replacement part or parts will cost, but I don’t expect to be spending more than fifty or sixty bucks.

I will try to remember to post an update on what’s going on with the repair.

In the meantime, if you are experiencing the same sort of problem, my research on the Net suggests that you should:

• test the Firewire cable by connecting another camcorder to it (borrow one from a friend if you have to)- if your operating system immediately detects a camcorder, the problem is with your camcorder, not the cable or computer;
• only connect the camera to the computer when the AC power supply – not the battery – is powering the camcorder.  There is some evidence out the problem may occur more frequently when transferring when the camera is powered by battery alone;
• make sure that the “USB streaming” option (in the camera menu) is turned OFF – if this setting is turned on, the camera will not send video through the Firewire port, even when a Firewire cable is attached.  Remember, the camera will transfere data either by USB or by Firewire, but not both.   I strongly recommend that you choose to use Firewire for all video transfer anyway because the USB transfer is lower resolution video;  it has fewer pixels and a lower frame rate, and looks kind of like a crappy webcam. Also, the audio transferred is mono instead of stereo;
• be sure that your camera is set to the “playback”, rather than “camera” mode (though really, it should work in both configurations.  Mine used to work regardless of which mode the camera was in);
• if none of the above suggestions fixes the problem, try experimenting with the order in which you are connecting the camera, firing up your software, etc.  Try commencing playback on the camera first, then connecting the Firewire cable, then starting your software, then beginning the video capture.  If that sequence doesn’t work, try connecting the cable first, then powering up the software and THEN commencing playback, etc.

One more thing – several of the various video forums I combed looking for solutions to the problem had threads in which people were complaining that their camera wasn’t functioning because it didn’t display a “DV Out” message when the Firewire cable was plugged in.   Be aware that the camera does NOT and shouldnot display this message.  If you’re waiting for those words to appear on your little LCD screen, you’ll be waiting a long time because they don’t appear when the camera is functioning properly.  The “DV In” message is simply meant to convey to the user that the camera is receiving DV-related information from the computer to which its attached;  all camcorders with Firewire ports are “DV Out” enabled – that’s what the port is for. Not all cameras, however, are designed to receive control signals from the computer (mostly tape transport instructions like fast forward, rewind etc.)   If you’re seeing the “DV In” message and your camcorder isn’t transferring video over the IEEE 1394 cable you’ve got connected to it, there is nothing wrong with the cable – the camera is receiving information from the computer.  My immediate suspicion is that you need to disable the USB streaming feature in order to START streaming via Firewire.

Wish me luck, I’ll keep y’all posted.

But I digress.

My point is that we had this job to do and people were depending on us.  Those of you in the working world will understand these concepts and identify them as something known as “responsibility”.  It is something that is entirely foreign to musicians, serious artists and other more highly evolved and important life forms.  Being a musician is not about producing things on time (except for musicians who actually get paid to do what they do because they’re good at it);  when you are a Serious Artist (please read: “unemployed”) working on a Weighty Piece of Art, you cannot be rushed, especially when you haven’t got a fucking clue what you’re doing or why (which is most of the time). The full explanation for this principle is complicated and top-secret (you have to be in the Union to get the complete spiel on this one) but I can tell you that what it boils down to is that as soon as any musician agrees to produce a certain quantity of music, he will immediately cease to produce any music whatsoever and instead spend a lot of time down at the pub.  This is mostly because it’s noisy and they have beer there, both of which are excellent accessories for the gentleman musician who is assiduously avoiding the nagging feeling that he’s falling well behind schedule, productivity-wise, and is thereby “letting the home side down”, also known as “spectacularly failing to achieve even a laughably modest amount of success in an oh-too-public fashion”.

I will spare you the hyperbole about my angst-ridden and lonely excursions through agonizing evening “writing sessions”, alone in my apartment and filled with self-doubt, plunking away on an uncooperative guitar that – for the most part – refused to offer up the masterpiece of musical beauty that would transform a lousy movie into a piece of art.  (Okay, so I lied, I won’t spare you all of the hyperbole about that.  Sue me.)

Eventually, through a confidential commercial transaction that I am not fully at liberty to discuss, certain nefarious underworld forces delivered to me, as consideration for some (somewhat damaged) spiritual merchandise I offered for sale, a tune or two that could be worked into something approaching an interesting musical idea.  My bandmates and I headed into our expansive private studio of the day – of which more will be said in a moment – to work on the idea as a band, to settle on an arrangement, to rehearse the completed composition and ultimately, to record a demo of the song to play for the film’s production braintrust.

At the time that these events came to pass, in late 1998, our “expansive private studio” consisted of the second floor of a very small and extremely run-down house in eastern Toronto.  The house was owned by another friend of ours, a fellow who physically resembled Wavy Gravy of Woodstock fame, and we only ever referred to him as Wavy Gravy.  I have forgotten the man’s real name.   We’d done some work for Wavy Gravy but he had been unable to pay us for that work in any recognized medium of exchange, such as money.  You get used to that sort of thing as a musician, particularly when you are not an especially skilled musician.  There was a tenant on the first floor of the Wavy Gravy house, which was in an exceptionally dodgy neighbourhood.  I cannot imagine the horrors he endured during the few hours that we were not actively and aggressively attempting to destory his typmanic membranes from above.  The entire Wavy Gravy house was overrun with what I am going to continue to tell myself were particularly large mice with unusually long tails and larger than average teeth.  Its many charms included an apparently improperly grounded electrical system that delivered an astonishingly powerful shock to singers and other stupid people who happened to let their lips come into contact with a live microphone, a broken-down refrigerator literally filled with rotten stinking meat of indeterminate origin, and a “ventilation” system that furnished air thoroughly infused with the overpowering stench of urine throughout every square inch of the approximately sixty-four square feet of available floorspace.

The place also had some less positive features.  Chief among these was the community of inveterate thieves that apparently continually surveilled the premises simply waiting for the first available and highly inconvenient opportunity to enter the place and perpetrate assholery.  This they did, no doubt, by simply looking askance at the laughably dubious locking mechanism on the main door, and then making off with the only possessions that truly mattered to us at that time – our instruments.  These rotten soulless bastards also made off with the only possessions that truly mattered to the nice folks at Long & McQuade Musical Instruments, from whom we had rented a not inconsiderable amount of equipment (luxuries like microphones, speakers and tape recorders) in an effort to make a recording that accomplished the very important principal objective of existing.   No problem there, you might assume, it ought to be a simple matter of making a telephone call to the insurance claims agent.   The problem with insurance and musicians, however, is that insurance salesmen – unlike musicians – have not yet learned the skill of receiving payment for things (such as insurance coverage) without resorting to the use of actual money.   As money is only infrequently found in the vicinity of musicians, there is an inherent structural problem that is rather obvious.

Thus did it come to pass that – thanks to the Great Musical Instrument Theft of  Christmas Eve 1998 – our little tribe of Tiny Tims was saddled with an enormous debt to repay, no instruments to play, and no recognizable means of actually accomplishing the writing assignment that we had agreed to complete.  Other than that, things were just peachy.

You might conclude, based on a cursory review of the tale recounted above, that my experience with helping create cinema was a negative one.  You’d be wrong;  before all our gear was stolen, there were some awesome afternoons spent in the Wavy Gravy house of horrors trying to capture our idea on tape.  The principal piece of music I’d come up with for the movie was something called “Sebastien’s Theme”, named after one of the eleventy-six principal characters in the film whose name I could remember.  I quite liked the general melody I’d come up with, but our lead guitarist and principal engineering nerd Rui really outdid himself on this one, adding an absolutely stunningly beautiful lead line that flowed over the entire piece and turned it into the most beautiful and haunting thing we had ever written.  At one point in the recording process, we discovered (quite by accident) that by turning up Rui’s amplifier to a truly Spinal Tap-esque volume level, certain passages of the line Rui had written were actually causing the entire Wavy Gravy house to literally resonate in sympathy with the tone generated, which sympathetic vibrations in turn permitted the strings to themselves vibrate in sympathy, creating an unusual and continuous tone with lots of sustain.  In person, while the passages were being recorded, it was rather like standing next to an aircraft engine that was being manipulated to play passages of Bach;  I am not exaggerating a single bit when I tell you that, at one point that afternoon I was over half a block away from the Wavy Gravy House and walking down the street to get a re-supply of cigarettes but I could CLEARLY hear the passage being played over the sounds of streetcars rumbling by on Queen Street East.  Oh yes, it was loud.  On the tape, though, the sound that we captured from Rui’s guitar/aircraft engine – severely attenuated and processed with a few electronics – sounded a lot like some kind of strange woodwind instrument that had the ability to morph from a peaceful round timbre into a strident and passionate wail.  The effect we achieved in recording that song was an accident born of equal parts experimentation and blind luck; of all the things we did, it’s one of my favourites.

Half a dozen years later, I was permanently retired from the life of an active and creative musician, but I didn’t know it yet.  I was fooling around with some video editing software (taking another gig, it turns out, was the right idea from a “making enough money to feed myself and purchase high tech toys” perspective).  I had been screwing around with some nature clips that I’d taken while on a fishing trip and I got the idea to try and slap together a kind of a music video for the tune.  I never thought anyone else would see it – this was back in ye olden days of 2003 before the YouTubination of the planet – so it’s got some rough spots (I think it’s fairly obvious that, in a couple of sections, I simply didn’t have any other footage that fit the “subject” requirements.  Watching it again for the first time in a couple of years the other day, I would do quite a few things differently if I was putting the piece together again.  Still, I enjoyed it enough to talk myself into broadcasting it to the world via YouTube.

Here then, is Sebastien’s Theme.  I don’t know if the other guys in the band have even ever seen this;  but that’s a story for another day.

I spent the late/afternoon and early evening shooting the footage I needed (it’s not complicated, believe me, and the “actors” are compliant enough types – little plastic figurines from the Homestar Runner series of web-toons).

That part of the “shoot” was easy and fun enough;  I had rigged up the workshop like a little studio, complete with a bristol-board background that I hope will do service as a (very low) budget “green screen” for some fun chroma key effects (superimposing the “actors” on a couple of amusing stock photos, etc.).

After dinner, I headed upstairs and connected my Sony DCR-HC26 to the computer to “capture” the footage I’d shot into my video editing suite of choice.  I have captured video successfully from this exact camera (using this very same cable) many times before without any appreciable difficulty, but on this occasion (probably because I’m working toward a deadline), the technical ghosts and goblins ran rampant over me.

Historically, I have connected the camera to my computer through an IEEE-1394 compliant, “Firewire” type cable.  The cable has the smaller “4 pin” connector at the end that attaches to the camera, and the normal size “6 pin” connector at the end that plugs in to the computer’s IEEE-1394 port.  Video capture has been smooth, fast and reliable, with few (if any) dropped frames.  Typically, with my video capture software package already running (and waiting expectantly for a “capture device” to be connected), I plug the cable in to the camera first, place the camera atop the desktop machine (it’s just a convenient surface to rest the camera on while capturing), then connect the cable to the computer.  Finally, I power up the camera and within a matter of seconds, Windows usually detects the camera, loads the necessary drivers and I’m good to go.

On this occasion, however, no matter what I did I could not get Windows to recognize that I had attached the Handycam.  On one or two occasions in the past, depending upon the video capture software I’ve been using at the time, I have found that it is helpful to experiment with the order in which things are connected, powered up and started.  For example, on certain occasions, I have had to plug the camera in, start the software, and THEN power up the camera in order to get the device recognized by Windows.

I tried every permutation and combination, to no avail.

I suspected that either the cable, the computer’s Firewire card, or the Firewire port on the side of the camera had failed somehow, and decided not to spend time trying to diagnose a problem that I might not be able to solve at eight o’clock in the evening on Sunday (i.e. if cables need replacing or cards/ports need repairing).  So, I turned my attention to the USB port on the side of the camera and set out to capture my video through that route.

I dug through the drawers in Mission Control looking for the specialized USB cable required – it has a mini USB connector  that is a narrow isoceles trapezoid at one end and a regular-sized rectangle at the other.  I wired the camera up, plugged it in to the USB port and powered up the camera.  Nothing.  After a few minutes, I determined that I needed to turn on the “USB stream” (using the touch screen menu, touch “FN”, then “Menu”;  scroll down using the arrow buttons to the setup menu, pres “exec”, then scroll down to “USB stream” and press “exec” again; select “On” to turn the USB stream on).  Bingo, the camera was recognized.

But the problem wasn’t solved yet.  My computer was searching for the USB drivers for this camera.  After a prolonged period of fooling with the “Found New Hardware” Wizard (who really has to be one of the most broke-ass falling-down wizards that ever there was – seriously, that dude can’t even make a parakeet disappear), I realized that the driver wasn’t going to be found by Windows and that I needed to help.  I started my search on the Internet.  Not knowing the NAME of the driver required makes this substantially more difficult even than it sounds, and so I quickly decided to abandon that option in favour of attempting to locate the CD that came with the camera, in the hopes that the required driver was included on that disc.  Twenty minutes and a few overturned and emptied drawers later, I was back at the computer with the CD, which does in fact contain the required driver – the file is installed (easily enough, I have to admit) by an executable file called “setup” in the “drivers” folder of the disc.  The actual driver file itself, however, seems to be stored in compressed form in one of two “.cab” files on the disc for reasons that are known only to Sony.  I suspect, though, that it’s very difficult to find a copy of this file on the Internet for that very reason.

Anyway, now I had a camera that was ready to play nice with my software – or so I thought.  Technically, the setup did what it was supposed to do;  video was transferred from camera to computer.  When I started up the capture process, however, it was obvious that USB capture is a second-rate, second-best option when compared to capture via IEEE-1394.  The tape transport controls in the capture software were greyed-out, except for the button starting the capture;  by contrast, using IEEE-1394, you can operate the camera tape transport mechanism remotely with your computer mouse and keyboard:  stop, fast forward, rewind, pause, play, commence – and conclude – capture.  An annoyance, for sure, but I could live with that loss of functionality if the quality of the captured video was worth anything.

It’s not.

Video is captured through the USB cable at a greatly reduced resolution (320 x 240, I think).  What this means is that significantly fewer pixels (about 22% when compared to the Firewire video at 720×480) are being captured and stored to ultimately convey the picture information.  The resulting loss in picture quality was obvious, even during the capture process. I checked around in my software to see if there were any options available to configure the USB capture at a higher resolution rate.  All those options were greyed-out;  I suspect that it is not possible to capture USB video at a higher resolution.

I ended up solving my problem last night in a way that probably won’t help anyone else;  I have an older JVC Mini-DV camcorder that also has an IEEE-1394 output.  The problem with that unit is that it is very finicky and often won’t playback anything (except a blue scren) on tapes that do have recorded information on them.  I essentially put the tape in and took it out multiple times (more than a dozen!) until the camera, for whatever reason, finally decided to co-operate and began playing back my video.  I connected this camera to the computer using the very same Firewire cable I had been using earlier;  the software instantly recognized that a camcorder had been attached and loaded the appropriate drivers.  I was capturing video successfully just a minute or two later.

Searching around on the Internet a bit last night and this morning to try and diagnose the problem with my DCR-HC26, I came across this and the forum discussion to which it refers, information that suggests one possible reason for the issue:  I was trying to capture from the camera when it was powered by the battery rather than the external power supply.  It is true that usually, I have the camera plugged into its AC power supply when capturing – but not last night.

Update: (Sept. 9/08) Tried it last night with the AC cable attached; still nothing.  Time to search for the “extended warranty” documentation – I think I actually bought the extended warranty on this camera because of all the problems I’d had with the previous JVC Camcorder.  Hmmm…..

‘Nother Update (January ’09): See this post for an update on the situation.