What's the best interface between camcorder & PC?

[phawkcpa]

I just got a Sony Digital Handycam that has i.link (I think this is the same as Firewire), RCA jacks, S-video, and USB outputs.

I am now in the market for an inexpensive capture card. I will mainly be capturing home videos to burn on VCDs and some day, DVDs. I hope to get into ripping and burning DVDs in the future as well.

Can somebody please clue me in on what interface I should be concentrating on when shopping for a capture card? I would have thought I should look for Firewire inputs, but I don't seem to see much about firewire in my research. Should I avoid using the USB and RCA jacks?

Any specfic recommendations for a capture card would also be greatly appreciated. I would like to stay under $100 if possible. This is a very confusing area to learn about!

Thanks in advance for your help.

[BKL]

I have a Sony TRV120 which offers analog in and pass-through to the PC via iLink (Firewire/1394). If your camera supports this feature, this gives you analog to digital conversion using the camcorder and will give excellent results when importing video from a VCR or other analog video source.

[TOMMO]

I agree totally with BKL. I have exactly the same camera with a 1394 firewire. Excellent quality.

It is better than DC30Plus or the DV500Plus (which are very expensive cards).

[phawkcpa]

Thanks for the replies guys, but I feel like I may be missing something. Do you mean that I do not need a capture card as long as I have a firewire port on my PC? I imagine I could just connect the camcorder to the port, but I always thought I also had to have a capture card to process the signal and save it to hard disk. Can this all be done with software?

Thanks again.

[ngnr]

No capture card required. The Firewire port transfers the video to your hard drive using software that you may have gotten with the camera, with the card or you can find online. It is transferred as digital video and even your analogue video can be transferred this way if you have passthough capability. I believe the resulting file is 720x480 in AVI DV format and about 3.6MB/s. There is a comparison here that will give more info. http://www.vcdhelp.com/comparison.htm

[jbrondum]

FireWire/iLink/IEEE 1394 or what they want to call it RuLeZ
...I have the same CamCorder and can highly recommend you to use the FireWire connection, you will not recret.