best way to capture and edit. just starting out.

[hmmmm]

i'm just starting out and i would like to capture/edit a bunch of analog hi8 tapes that i have. so i'm thinking about picking up a used digital8 camcorder to use to convert to AVI, and then get video vegas for the editing. my desktop isn't that powerful (only a pentium 3 with 833 MHz or so I think and 40 gig hard drive), so i'm not sure if i need to upgrade performance and/or get an additional hard drive (i must have 8 to 10 hours of video which in the end I suspect will be edited down to 45 minutes or so, so I'm not sure if I actually need much more disk space). and I don't know yet how to take my final product and put on to dvd.

any thoughts on any (or all!!!!) of this would be greatly appreciated. i'm still trying to figure out the best plan of attack. thanks.

[CauCauCau]

I do all my capturing and encoding with a 700 Mhz computer with 128 mb of RAM and only a 17 gig hardrive (with only 13 free). DV is a little bigger in file size than what I do though. I capture to AVI with PicVideo's MJPEG codec-- 15:1 compression, DV is what, 5:1? If you want to get all of your video footage onto the computer at once in DV format (passed through a digital video camera via fire wire, right?), you may need more harddrive space. Alternatively, put on the first 3 or so hours, edit, delete what you're not going to use and then do the second chunk and then a third.

I'm not sure how processor intensive encoding from DV to DVD would be, but you'll definitely be able to do 45 minutes in a reasonable amount of time.