Need advice on what capture card or device I need

[film842]

I have an older DSR-11 that I want to use with Premeire to capture digital video and a brand new hot shot computer. The DSR-11 uses an ie1394 firewire connection and my new computer doesnt have that port or card. Can anyone suggest an external card of some sort? I really don"t want to crack this pc open again. Thanks.

[John T Smith]

I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think the current verion of PPro has firewire capture... have you checked the program to find out if it still has that function?

[film842]

No I haven't. If that's true, i wonder where that leaves me. I have an awful lot of mini DV tapes that I would like to digitize.

[Ann Bens]

Find yourself an older computer with firewire and windows 10 (not 11)

W11 does support FireWire but might not recognize the DSR-11.

You can try this software also: http://www.scenalyzer.com/

[Peru Bob]

Premiere Pro no longer has capture.

You can use these free programs for capture:

WinDV   WinDV

HDVSplit   HDVSplit 0.77 beta

[John T Smith]

I have read in the past about devices-and-programs that will connect to a USB port... with the VERY large drawback being that due to the low transfer rate of USB the external devices compress the video so much that editing is a problem

I think you are going to have to buy a firewire card to put inside your computer

[JonesVid]

I have same task to import lots of DV/HDV tapes - I bought myself a Firewire PCIe Express card off Amazon. Not expensive.

I think Windows 10 recognises it straight away.

Ann Bens is correct that Windows 10 is best, it lists Sony /Generic options I think. 

I just had a look on my Windows 10 back up PC with Creative Cloud and the last Premiere Pro version supporting Firewire Capture is 2023 version - hence a problem..... as Adobe only supports last 2 releases unless you already have it on your machine historically. 

There are external convertor /adaptors about to go from Firewire to Thunderbolt 4 interface but never used one, hence I think you are going to have to open up the PC again if you have a spare PCIe express slot.

I tried out the HDV split program that Peru Bob mentions and this also works OK.

This is a very old utility and has no support of course.

[John T Smith]

What I used with some old VHS tapes is http://www.scenalyzer.com/ and it works well, do change the default Fat32 to NTFS setting to not have lots of 4gig files
-I have NOT used the scene detect function in scenalyzer, so don't know how well it works

The last time I converted Analog to Digital (VHS tapes from an EARLY camera) I used an external Grass Valley ADVC 110 (no longer made) to do the conversion and then send the signal to my computer via Firewire cable