Tips on Capturing HV20 Footage to your Vista PC

In windows Vista, the best way to still get the best footage out of your Canon HV20/30 is the method explained at Eugenia’s Rant.  Also, I noticed that in Vista at least Premiere Pro CS3 will not properly capture footage from the HV20.  Unless yon are using Vegas as outlined below, use HDVsplit.  Eugenia explains:

HDVSplit is a popular HDV capture freeware utility. While it generally works OK, unfortunately it occasionally crashes Vegas, because HDVSplit’s captured .m2t scenes erroneously have some black frames at the end of each scene. So, if you will use HDVSplit with anything but Vegas, that’s OK. Otherwise, use Vegas’ own HDV capture facility (which is one big continuous .m2t file for Vegas version 7 or earlier, and with scene detection support, in smaller .m2t files in version 8). Obviously, version 8 is recommended over other Vegas versions for that reason alone. The Pro versions of Vegas 7/8 support scene detection too after you install its official updates from Sony’s site.

Please read her site for excellent articles on the subject of capturing from the HV20/30 into Vegas and other software.  Sadly, she will no longer be updating her blog.

I can usually capture quite easily in Vegas although I still think their capture utility leaves much to be desired.  I WISH I could capture with Premiere since I like its logging in/out feature for capture – which is the way any decent capture program should work) but no dice with the HV20.  At one point I did find a patch for Premiere that was essentially an import template specifically for the Canon HV20/30.  A Google search may turn up the most recent location for this small downloadable and very useful file.

This seems to have been corrected and improved in Adobe Premiere CS4 but the verdict is still out.