Can someone help me with a good solution for transfering my VHS-C and Mini DV tapes to my hard drive. Currently I am using MCE so in my case I think the video files on my computer will be of more use to me than DVDs. My first goal it to just get the raw footage transfered and then later I may think about some editing. I realize that I can use My Movies 2 to do this but I would probably be doing it on the same comptuer I was working on (surfing the net, email, quicken, word, etc) would this be a problem? How well does something like the Dazzle Video Creator Platinum Plus work? It has a hardware decoder on board so I thought this may take some pressure off of the computer. Are there other hardware solution available?

Mike

Don't waste your money on the Dazzle junk or trying to do 2 things at once. If you are bound and determined to do more than one thing at a time, buy a 2nd computer. You are just going to be spinning your wheels with what you describe above.

If you really want to save time, buy a DVD recorder that has a built-in hard drive and do all your transferring, editing and DVD burning with it while surfing and emailing with your computer.

Dave

Don't waste your money on the Dazzle junk or trying to do 2 things at once. If you are bound and determined to more than one thing at a time, buy a 2nd computer. You are just going to be spinning your wheels with what you describe above.

If you really want to save time, buy a DVD recorder that has a built-in hard drive and do all your transferring and DVD burning with it while surfing and emailing with your computer.

Dave

Do the DVD recorders with hard drive copy to a format that I can use on my computer? I don't really want the tapes on DVD I want to be able to view them using My Videos on MCE.

Mike

Sorry...I misunderstood your post. Most people want to view their video on DVD's. Ignore everything I said.

Dave

Can someone help me with a good solution for transfering my VHS-C and Mini DV tapes to my hard drive.
I'm assuming you have a miniDV camcorder if you're posting in this area. Does the camera have a FireWire (IEEE 1349) connection? If so, this will be the easiest way to transfer it to the PC (obviously the PC needs a FireWire port too). The streamed material would probably end up in an AVI container file on the hard drive. For editing there are a host of non-linear editing (NLE) packages on the market.
As for the VHS-C material, does your camcorder have analog inputs that you could capture from the VHS deck to miniDV (and then to the PC via FW...)?

Correct. I have a mini DV camera with a firewire port and my computer also has a firewire port. Currently I am most concerned with just getting the video to my computer so we can use it (ie watch it) and so that it is preserved. I realize that there are a lot of things that can be done with digital video as far as editing goes but in all honesty I don't really have the time to do that now but I do feel an urgency to get my video on a hard drive for backup purposes and again so that the kids can use MCE to view them when they want to.

What is the difference between the firewire port on my computer, which is just the basic port included with the comptuer, and something like a video capture card? Should I be able to plug my DV Camera into the firewire port and capture the video with Windows Movie Maker in good enough quality to watch on a 65 inch tv? Which format would I capture to?

Mike

Good idea on the backup to a hard drive. Especially if kids are involved. :)

A video capture card will usually generate MPEG-2 files, the same format that's used on DVD. Transfering from your miniDV camera to the PC via FireWire will keep the native format of DV which is technically better than MPEG-2. DV is 720x480 resolution like DVDs, but uses intra-frame compression and 4:1:1 chroma sub-sampling. If that doesn't mean anything to you, just consider it better color fidelity and much easier to edit (someday) than MPEG-2. When transfered down via FireWire, they will be saved to most likely an AVI container file which is just a way to store the streaming data. But, the drawback is the files will be much larger than MPEG-2 from a video capture card. Consider, DVDs can store hours of audio and video in 9.4GBs (capacity of dual-layer discs) and under. One hour of DV video alone will eat about 13GB of hard drive space. If your storage space is limited, I would go with a video capture card and generate MPEG-2 files. If you're one of the lucky ones with a whopping terabyte hard drive, I would stick with the native DV format and generate AVI files.

Either way will look good on your display I would think, but keep in mind the quality will always be limited by the original recordings.

Thanks for you help. I am going to get a firewire cable and give it a try today. I may be back for help.

Mike

Something else to mention is that your capture software will have control of the camera over firewire and that probably won't be the case with a capture card...