Pls help! Hot to capture using laptop?

[sesquim]

Hi all! I'm so glad I found this site! I have so many Hi8 home videos and I want to put them in cd cuz is better. I did some research around before posting here but I have a question for you guys... Ok is my laptop powerful enough to capture and convert to vcd?

Laptop model: i-Buddie A928
CPU: P4 1.6
Hard Drive: 20gig
Memory: 256DDR

My laptop has a firewire port and so does my Sony digital8 camcorder. I would be working on 1hour home videos. I have about 50 hi8 and 8mm and digital 8 tapes. When I heard about how you can put them on cd's and watch them as VCD's I thought its really great! but too much for me and confusing. But now I'm gona give it try and I need your guys help. All I need now is i.Link CABLE and then i'm ready. So what do you guys think?

How long do you guys think it would take my laptop to convert an hour of home video? and how long to capture? and how much Gig's would i need for an hour of video?

Thanks a lot!

[skateni]

On the whole, your laptop should be ok except the hard disk is a tad too small. An hour of DV would take up approximate 13 Gb so you don't have much leftover 8)

[dcsos]

All you need to do,
If the i-Budd's FIREWIRE PORT is only 4pin,
is get that $70 PMCIA CARD with 2 more firewire ports..then connect 120gig or so hdd to firewire port and capture to it

You don't drop frames with firewire caputure
it'll work great on that system

[sesquim]

Oh koOL! Thanks to the both of you! Thank you very much!
Take care!

[donpedro]

dcsos, do I realy need extra firewire port ? My external hardrive and DVD burner case have 2 firewire ports. What I do is this....

Connect cable from laptop do HD and from HD to DVD burner.... this way I am able to use both drives without problem. I never tried it with camcorder. Do you think that that would not work same way ?