Help! Trying to capture video from my camera.

[cyberock]

I'm really desperate here. I'm trying to convert some old childhood beta tapes of my fiancee to dvd for my future father-in-law's birthday. I took the advice of you guys and got a digital camcorder that has USB pass through and bought the Sony TRV27. I rented a beta player which you wouldn't believe the headaches to find one of those. I have the beta player hooked up to my camcorder and the camcorder is connected to my PC through USB. The program that comes with the Sony camera shuts down after about 20 minutes of video capturing to convert to mpeg claiming it reached disk limitation. Not sure how that is possible since I have 40 gigs free. I decided to buy the download version of Ulead DVD Moviefactory since that has video capture. After wasting $45 on that program, it doesn't work for me. I get a mpeg capture error. I need help finding a decent video capture program that I can use with my Sony camcorder that won't drop out frames and is easy to use since I'm an extreme beginer. Help!

 

[rbV5]

Rather than use usb, you should be using firewire to convert your analog footage to digital files on your PC. You need a firewire PCI card (get one that comes with DV editing software), then its just hook you analog source (beta player) into the A/V input..then send it to the PC via i.LINK (firewire). Then you'll be working with DV video to edit your video footage. Perhaps your DVD authoring software will then be able to encode to MPEG-2 to burn.

 

[cyberock]

is there one you recomend that isn't too expensive?

 

[oldfart]

What rbV5 said. Firewire, not USB for the connection.

1 Hr worth of video should be ~ a 12 Gig AVI file. You then have to encode it to MPEG2 format. Dont encode to MPEG2 during capture if you want decent quality.

 

[cyberock]

I was just wondering which firewire card I should get for this. How does the beta machine that has rca outs hook up to the firewire card?

 

[oldfart]

Any of them will do. It looks like this.

Beta deck--->RCA Cable--->DV Cam RCA input--->DV Cam A/D conversion--->DV CAM Firewire Port--->Firewire Cable--->PC Firewire Card.

 

[cyberock]

so will this do what I want http://www.bestbuy.com/detail.asp?e=11008721&m=488&cat=521&scat=1751 ?

 

[oldfart]

I like This One
The Pinnacle Studio 8 software is very good. Powerful, yet easy for a beginner to use. It also has DVD authoring built in.

 

[ericboo]

I have the SIIG card and it works fine for me. My brother switched to Adaptec's because he felt it was a slight improvement.

 

[cyberock]

Thanks for the advice. I'm going to try and get the Pinnacle one tonight. Hope it works! Thanks!

 

[cyberock]

Well, I successfully made a dvd this morning! My soundcard had a firewire connection on it so all I had to do was buy the firewire cable. I ended up buying the Pinnacle Firewire cable that came with Studio 7. Everything turned out good! Thanks again for the help!!!