Exactly what goes on in conversion?

[Haopengyou]

I have used a minidv camcorder a few times. As I understand it, when I connected it to my firewire port what I was doing was simply copying the file from the tape in the mini dv camcorder to the hard drive in my computer. There was nothing else done at that time.

Now, when I connect my VCR to either a Leadtek Winfast (pci card inside the computer) or to some usb or firewire "box" hooked, pop the tape into the vcr and push play, what is happening? Is it "simply" going to digitize the movie and store it on my hard drive for future editing, or is it going to be doing other things at the same time, i.e. color correction, etc.

[jagabo]

Now, when I connect my VCR to either a Leadtek Winfast (pci card inside the computer) or to some usb or firewire "box" hooked, pop the tape into the vcr and push play, what is happening? Is it "simply" going to digitize the movie and store it on my hard drive for future editing, or is it going to be doing other things at the same time, i.e. color correction, etc.

Depends on the device and software. At the simplest they just digitize and save in a file. Others will allow you to perform some filtering before saving. Even when "capturing" from a DV camcorder, some software will allow some filtering before saving the data.