[Gllug] Getting videos onto my computer

[Jason Clifford]

On Mon, 31 May 2004, John Winters wrote:

> I have a small collection of personal video tapes which I've made over
> the years.  (Children's birthdays and the like.)  Since video tape is
> not a good long term medium it seems obvious to transfer them to
> computer.  What sort of hardware do I need to allow me to connect my
> video camera to the computer and copy them over?  Would a TV card do the
> trick?

If your video camera is a VHS or Hi-8 one you should be able to use a good 
TV card (ie one with video capture facilities). 

If you expect to do lots of capture it would be beneficial to have a 
hardware encoder on the card as well.

If the camera is a DV one it probably (almost certainly) has firewire in 
which case you just need a firewire/1394 port on your PC.

In either case you'll need lots of disk space.

If you want to edit the video you can use something like MPTools 
(http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net/), MainActor 
(http://www.mainconcept.com/downloads.shtml) or Kino 
(http://kino.schirmacher.de/) if you are using a DV camera.

If you want something "not suitable for consumers" you could try Cinelerra 
(http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3) although this is really for 
those who want to produce movies and requires a more powerful system (or 
farm of them!).

Jason Clifford
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