Anyone tried one of these (or similar)?

[Him Her]

I have to copy some recordings off an old camcorder (before it dies!) - it's only got phono for video/audio out and, so far, I've only managed to get an old VCR to talk to it.

This is painful as I have to keep checking what I got off - no review option - so I thought one of these might get me straight to PC as the aim is to go to DVD anyway.

 

[MH]

You may need to get something like this - .roxio.com/eng/products/creator/device/overview.html

 

[little_pob]

Easycap and other USB video capture devices have been discussed on DW before:
http://www.digitalworldz.co.uk/search.php?searchid=1486578

Pinnacle's Studio Box and Board products generally get better reviews (which might be down to the software rather than the hardware), but even on ebay they're around £50.

Now what I'm not suggesting you do is "buy one", copy your videos and send it back within 7 days under distance selling regs.

 

[Him Her]

The link didn't work M8 - should I try the cheapo one first (given I'm gonna ditch the kit after anyways) - or is there a good reason for me to go for the more expensive option?

 

[ekwat]

If you have a newer DV camcorder, or you can borrow one, with composite video/audio input you might be better off copying to that then firewiring to your pc/mac. It's a bit of messing around but has great results.

 

[Him Her]

I have the newer kit, problem is the old kit will connect to jack and that's where the old recordings are. At the mo' I'm scarting into an old VCR and that's working but it's kinda painful.

Think I'll just have to take the pain here and try the cheapo option to get from VCR to PC - if it don't work I'll move up to the more expensive option - a decade of kids on camcorder to grab

 

[daveleebond]

I just recently converted my ma's old video8 tapes to vob's then DVD's using an easycap clone and WinAVI capture, which was free, worked a treat

 

[Arthur Daley]

At the mo' I'm scarting into an old VCR and that's working but it's kinda painful.

In your situation I think that the obvious and still cheapo way to do this would be to use/get/borrow a DVD recorder (the kind that were intended to do away with video recorders for recording from your tv) and scart into that and copy to a dvd disk of your choice.

Then make sure you get the dvd recorder to "finalise" the disk, or otherwise "make compatible" to enable the pc to have no problems reading from it. Then rip the vobs or the separate recordings to your hard drive with your software of choice, then finally edit together and burn.

I am sure you will have many recommendations concerning which softwares to use, should you need it.

 

[Him Her]

Just a quick reply to say thanks for all the suggestions - ta muchly

 

[little_pob]

The link didn't work M8

Sorry, the link was just to a DW search for "EasyCap". Because it had an ID string I hoped the query might have been stored on the server rather than locally. (What do they say about assumptions? )

- should I try the cheapo one first (given I'm gonna ditch the kit after anyways) - or is there a good reason for me to go for the more expensive option?

The reports were the EasyCap and clones can drift out of sync after a while - or at least they would 2 years ago.

 

[Captin]

The way I've done it in the past is to plug the camcorder into a DVD RAM recorder, record the footage onto a re-writable RAM disk, then copied the video file on to the pc. The I made a proper DVD with freemake. The quality was better than the easycap I had and was less stress on my pc.

 

[oneman]

I use a DV Camcorder with analogue input, only problem is that it has 90 minute capture time limit as that's how long the tape is. That then gets transferred via firewire for editing on the PC.