Well what started as "one touch" conversion of my analog video files to digital has as I feared, become more envolved.
I of course first discovered the fact that fat32 is not the current standard for windows XP or off the shelf external hard drives. XP apparently won't format hard drives in fat32 over 32 gig. My external Maxtor hard drive is 750 gig which was by the way on sale at Fry's for only $119, which to me is amazing ( in a year maybe not, but today amazing)
I found a site where I was able to download a small program which would format large drives (up to 2 terrabytes) in fat32 and with some luck and a great deal of faith I reformated the hard drive. Pinnacle might want to work out a deal with this programmer for his file as the program worked very well, scary but very well.
With the correct hard drive format I was able to get everything to turn blue for the first time. Yet when I tried to record the lights stayed blue and no recording took place.
A quick look here got me to believe that even though I had just bought the product, I needed to up date the firmware on the box. With the directions at this site I updated the firmware after finding an unused fat32 USB flash drive. Of course that unused one was old and bigger around than the rest and I had to unplug most of my other stuff to get it to work.
The updating the firmware was uneventful and now everything seemed to work as I copied two short one minute files on to the external hard drive. The computer of course by this time decided to get confused over which device was the flash drive and which was the external hard drive, but with a little rebooting it finally figured it out and everything is working.
Here is my problem: I have 25 year old beta tapes I am trying to transfer to digital. The beta player is brand new, I bought it about 10 years ago at a very high premium price from Sony as they were being phased out. It is new but at the same time it is still 10 years old. The images tend to cut in and out occasionally and there are a lot of drop outs. I recorded in "best" as I plan to put them on DVD and with such big hard drives out there why not.
On my first two test segments I have the audio clear as a bell, but the video is just a black screen on replay. I had a monitor attached to this recording process and there was video present during recording. Nothing shows up on the screen on replay with real player, I get crystal clear audio but the screen is black.
Is my problem with real player, recording in best or is it that the image is not that great and tends to cut in and out as it hits bad spots and the poor auto tracking trys to keep up and the Pinnacle needs a steady video output.
I'm going to switch to Hi8 svideo that I have and get some practice there, before tackling old beta again. I've thought about recording it all onto Hi8 and then going digital.
If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. I dont know how many plays I have left on these old tapes, so I dont want to keep experimenting too much.
Thanks in advance