Transfering Tapes to Computer - Hardware Solution?

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

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

Dave

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...)?

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.

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...