Technetos

Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge & Vegas Video Capture

Introduction

Sonic Foundry Vegas Video is a powerful non-linear digital video editor for the PC running under Microsoft Windows.

The Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge is a nifty but very low-cost little firewire capture device that can import/export analog and digital video to/from a firewire port on the PC.  However, the DV-Bridge has some timing peculiarities that make it not work well with Vegas Video 3.0.  This page is a published work-a-round for this problem as described by a Sonic Foundry employee on a user forum.  I have used this procedure and it did work and resolved the problems I experienced using these two products together.

The Problem

The Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge A/V has capture performance problems and drops frames during capture due to improper timecode updating in the product.

The Solution

Disable the DV-Bridge's timecode update.

    NOTE:  This will only work if you're NOT using the LANC adapter.

  1. Power down Dazzle and disconnect DV cable from PC.
  2. Ensure the Dazzle's LANC connector is NOT connected to anything.
  3. Ensure DV device control is enabled in Video Capture.
  4. Power up the Dazzle, set to "A to D" mode, and then connect DV cable to PC.
  5. Ensure that converted DV stream is previewing properly on Video Capture's Capture tab (by manually controlling analog source) and that timecode is updating (albeit incorrectly). The play transport button should be toggled down (if not then hit Play).
  6. Hit the pause transport button, this should stop the timecode from updating (audio seems to stop also), while the video continues to be delivered.
  7. Disable DV device control.
  8. Now the converted DV stream should be ok, while the timecode doesn't update.
  9. To get the timecode to 00:00:00;00, cycle through the "modes" until back to "A to D" mode.
  10. Capture footage:  the dropped frame count during capture and in the post capture dlg should now be 0.

    11. **Switching the Dazzle "mode", "Reconnect to current device" from Video Capture, and disconnecting the DV connection from the Dazzle to the computer do not seem to affect it once it's setup this way.

    **However, if you do connect the LANC adapter, or cycle the power on the Dazzle, you'll need to run through these steps again to get the timecode from updating.

References

To review a discussion of this work-a-round search the Sonic Foundry User Forums for the phrase dazzle* hollywood.

Page updated on Monday, 20-Oct-2008 08:31:36 CDT.