Jonathan Oxer
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Blog > Using a Canon HV30 with FOSS tools
>> Using a Canon HV30 with FOSS tools
Sat, Jul 5th 11:08pm 2008: Tech Toys
I've been having fun with the HV30 but had a bit of trouble getting footage off it. The camera is a bit light on when it comes to bundled software: basically MacOS and Windows tools for getting still images off it, and that's all. No video editing software at all.
Even though I personally prefer to use open-source software whenever possible there are still times that I resort to starting up a Mac to get something specific done. This was one of those times I assumed that it would just be easier on the Mac so I fired up an old Power Mac G4 with iMovie.
Epic fail.
The Mac was only running MacOS 10.3.9 and the version of iMovie included is too old to support high-def video, and it wouldn't even recognise that the camera existed at all. It would probably have worked with iMovie2 on MacOS 10.5, but that's extra $$$ I don't have.
Turns out I already had everything I needed on Ubuntu and shouldn't have even bothered starting up the Mac!
All I had to do was plug the camera into the FireWire port, put it into playback mode (but not actually start playback), and:
dvgrab then starts the camera automatically and saves all the clips to disk as .m2t files. The "-f hdv" tells it to use high-def mode, and the "-a" is for auto-split so each clip on the camera is saved as a separate file.
If you don't get any output check permissions on /dev/raw1394 and put yourself in the group with r/w privileges and you should be all set.
FOSS wins again!
I've been having fun with the HV30 but had a bit of trouble getting footage off it. The camera is a bit light on when it comes to bundled software: basically MacOS and Windows tools for getting still images off it, and that's all. No video editing software at all.
Even though I personally prefer to use open-source software whenever possible there are still times that I resort to starting up a Mac to get something specific done. This was one of those times I assumed that it would just be easier on the Mac so I fired up an old Power Mac G4 with iMovie.
Epic fail.
The Mac was only running MacOS 10.3.9 and the version of iMovie included is too old to support high-def video, and it wouldn't even recognise that the camera existed at all. It would probably have worked with iMovie2 on MacOS 10.5, but that's extra $$$ I don't have.
Turns out I already had everything I needed on Ubuntu and shouldn't have even bothered starting up the Mac!
All I had to do was plug the camera into the FireWire port, put it into playback mode (but not actually start playback), and:
dvgrab -f hdv -a
dvgrab then starts the camera automatically and saves all the clips to disk as .m2t files. The "-f hdv" tells it to use high-def mode, and the "-a" is for auto-split so each clip on the camera is saved as a separate file.
If you don't get any output check permissions on /dev/raw1394 and put yourself in the group with r/w privileges and you should be all set.
FOSS wins again!
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