The title about says it all. I have several videotapes of personal events that I would like to convert to computer files so I can put them on the web and send to people and stuff. Anyone know how this can be done?
You need an NTSC capture board for your PC. Then you can hook up your VCR to your PC and record actions from your monitor onto a VCR tape, or vice-versa with higher-end models. Although, I did this years ago - there may be something better these days…
There is something much better: DV (digital video). The new digital camcorders take care of the conversion of light or analog video into digital files, and connect directly to computers for editing.
Try the following:
-
Get access to a digital camcorder. Make sure that it allows recording to the tape from an external analogue input, and also has a “Firewire port” for transfer of digital video files.
-
Get access to a computer with a Firewire port and digital video editing software.
-
Hi Opal!
-
Connect the play output of the VCR to the record line input of the camcorder.
-
Put a blank tape in the camcorder.
-
Put your source tape in the VCR.
-
Press play on the VCR and Record on the camcorder. The camcorder records your video… digitally.
-
Connect the computer and the camcorder through their Firewire ports.
-
Use the video-editing software on the computer to transfer the video from the camcorder to the computer. Since the video was digitised in the camcorder, this step is essentially just a file transfer.
-
Edit the video (if desired) and save it in your desired format.
Using a camcorder as a digital recorder avoids the problem of getting a video digitiser for the computer, and even the digital cameras that are affordable by mere mortals have much higher recording quality than VHS is capable of, so quality is not a problem if you’re coming from VHS.
This means you can get a much cheaper computer setup, without an expensive video digitiser in the computer. This is how Apple can get away with selling iMac DVs at affordable prices: the camcorder is extra.
The computer still needs a LOT of memory and hard drive space: at least 128MB of memory, and 30 GB of hard drive space. As an example, 1 hour and 20 minutes of video at full DV resolution occupied 20 GB of hard drive space in my friends computer.
Once your video is in the computer as a file, you can optimise it and save it in the various web formats.
The editing software should give you some choices here. “Adobe Premiere” is an example of the expensive pro software, and it’ll optimise and save in all sorts of ways.
The less expensive consumer editing software, the kind that comes with the $149 Firewire cards, should work fairly well though.
Ah come on search, this gets asked almost every other week.
“30 GB of hard drive space” Nonono that whole thing isn’t what he wants to do, they want to email it & put it on the web, your idea makes things way too big.
All you need is a video input card & some compression software. I saw such a beast there at buy.com for around $50, it came with a webcam & card with video a/v inputs.
I should point out that Macintosh computers come with free video editing software, iMovie. Products like Premiere are professional level, and definitely overkill for most consumer-level video editing jobs.
If you don’t have the videos in DV format, like on VHS or something, you can convert them to DV format for input over a firewire interface with a simple box like the Sony Media Converter.
If you want to put stuff on the web, Quicktime has the best quality compression, and can produce files in standard MPEG formats that can be read by any machine. But you have to get the full-bandwidth DV version into your machine before you can compress it.
Yeah, but it’d be nice to have somewhere to oh, I don’t know, actually store that video so the compression programs can compress it, don’t you think?
It should also be noted that a video “input” card would be worthless going Sunspace’s nifty DV camera route. For that, you would, as previously noted, need a firewire card (unless, of course, your computer already has firewire ports).
A note on DV cameras, Verrain. While Sunspace mentioned DV, I believe that DV is actually a type of digital video, and the most expensive one at that. There are other digital video cameras out there such as digital 8 and digital beta that would probably be cheaper, though probably not as feature laden. (Or I could be wrong and DV could be a catch all term, I forget…)
<KK’s two cents>
Depending on the amount of cash you have to toss at this project, I’d recommend going the analog video capture card route as a midrange digital 8 video cam usually carries a suggested retail of $600+. (The cheapest I ever found - and actually bought - was about $585 on eBay. Unfortunately, some postal worker chose to steal it out of the box en route…)
There are a ton of 'em out there and you can probably find reviews for some at http://www.tomshardware.com, as he seems to be something of a digital video editing fan. Some decent capture products to look at would be the Pinnacle cards such as the DC10 and, IIRC, DC20. They’ll often come bundled with decent software and generally give you better quality (and less generation loss) than “all in one” graphics cards or cheaper capture products. This can come in really handy if your videos are on older and/or cheaper tapes, which cheaper products (such as my beloved Radeon VIVO) can be pretty unforgiving about).
</KK’s two cents>
I should probably add that the Pinnacle DC10, which I just priced at http://www.pinnaclesys.com, is squarely in the “not bad” range at $100. Don’t get it mixed up with the DV10, which is their DV/Digital 8 version of the same.
They have cheaper/expensiver products, depending on what you want, and have a pretty solid reputation for building good entry level (and supposedly more professional) products.
(And no, I don’t work for them. :))
This thing also looks pretty cool (besides sounding like it meets your needs).
God, I need to get off their website…
Here’s Ars Technica’s fledgeling A/V FAQ. Video capture is one of the things we’ve gotten down to an art form
Yeah, but if all you want is to store your movies on a hard drive, it’s probably not worth it to plunk down 800 smackers if you already have most of the equipment.
I’d recommend just buying a video card with video in/out. If you want to go Firewire, go nuts (my friend, the video editing genius, doesn’t use Firewire - yet - but that’s because he’s too lazy to install it into his computer and set it up properly).
Further suggestion: Avoid any ATI cards (especially the All-In-Wonder cards) like the plague.
Don’t listen to these people. Get a D-Link USB video capture cable. It costs about $60 at buy.com and does a perfectly good job. I use mine constantly. You just hook your video out into its line in and off you go. No frills, but it works just great.
“(The cheapest I ever found - and actually bought - was about $585 on eBay.”
Yeah, I used to visit surplusdirect.com where people bought new camcorders then promptly put them on ebay.com where people paid $100 or more for them. Very common practice.
Right now for $415 you can get that nifty JVC DV300U (I think this is the model nbr) from buydig.com what a deal.
I found it, now you can do it for about $4.99 after rebate, comes with card & video camera. Cybertainment Video E-Mail System at tigerdirect.com
Pentium 133 or better, you get:
CyberMail Video E-Mail software with SQUEEZE-PLAY technology
Send video and audio e-mail messages to family, friends, and associates around the
world.
Squeeze-Play’s 900 to 1 compression generates the smallest, fastest video e-mail
available
Message playback requires NO special hardware or software.
Compatible with every e-mail program that supports attachments.
PCI capture card with three inputs allows users to capture video from any source
including the CyberCam, VCR, or camcorder directly to files on your PC.
DirectX support
Full Motion Video Capture
Sizable capture up to 640x480 resolution
Supports 16, 24, or 32-bit color
Capture up to 30 frames per second
Two composite (RCA) inputs
One S-Video input
Hmm… there is even more here than I knew about!
Yes, KBBattousai, ‘DV’ is a type of digital video camera; ‘miniDV’ is the consumer variant. I think it’s the most common though. My friend has a ‘Digital8’ (D8) camera, and it has a Firewire port as well. He said that D8 stores its data on its 8mm tape in the same digital format as a newer and more expensive consumer DV camera stores data on its miniDV tape. Both connect to a computer equally easily.
My friend has the Pinnacle DV500, which provides a video-in junction box as well as Firewire input. And it came with Adobe Premiere. But it cost $1500 Canadian, which may be overkill for Verrain’s purposes.
Equipping a computer with an inexpensive Firewire input and editing software and then borrowing/renting a camera for conversion may still be the cheapest way to do this. I have seen Firewire interfaces for $99 at Circuit City, but these did not have the analog inputs. I admit that Arken’s video-to-USB cable sounds intriguing.
However you get the video into the computer, you still need the storage space though. Even 5 minutes of video occupies a lot of space. Plus you need ‘scratch’ space for temporary storage during editing (if desired) and conversion.
This is my constraint right now: my computer is only a Pentuim-II 350, which is rather underpowered for this sort of thing. I need much more HD space and a faster motherboard before I can really start doing this.