complete newbie with a camcorder

[ReallyStupid]

I am totally new to this so cut me a little slack. I did a search on capturing from an old Hi 8mm camcorder but I am still confused. I got into this because I just upgraded to win XP and it has a video editing program included. I thought that would be great to do but it seems much more involved after reading the posts here. Basically I have a 1.4 tbird with 256 megs of ram and a geforce gts2 video card. I would like to take the film from my old hi8 proview camcorder transfer it to the computer, edit it, enhance it, and transfer it to disk for safe keeping or sending to grandma. What do I need hardware wise, software wise, I do not want to buy another video card. and what are the steps? When do I edit it, before or after converting it. And have any of you put together a step by step guide for doing this? And there is no way my wife is going to let me spend a lot of money on this. I appreciate any and all help.


RS

[doobit]

Sorry, but you are going to have to buy SOMETHING to get that video into your computer. That means a capture card, and/or a DV converter, or another camera that has an IEEE 1394 port on it. That can be a miniDV camera, or a DV camera, or a Digital 8 camera. The capture card can be a DV capture card, and they are pretty cheap.

[jasperpso]

First you will need a video capture board. There are many to choose from but i was recently faced with this decision and I choose the ATI TV-Wonder (not VE) because it has s-video input and even included a tv tuner.(69$ from tiger direct) The stock software will have to be upgraded off the ATI website for it to work in XP but it does wotk fine in XP. My cousin's board isnt so lucky, drivers arent available for xp yet so be careful what you buy. Also it includes a very adequate software package for capturing your video into the computer into mpeg-1 or mpeg-2 format. From there transferring that footage to a cd is fairly simple and the information is all on this website. It is really fairly simple and nothing else to buy because software is all included or available on the net. Jasper@hotmail.com