Capturing Question

[pfisher]

I have a Vista computer with Happauge WinTV HVR 1600 tuner card. I have an old Sony CCD-TRV 308 camcorder with S Video in the front of the camcorder. This type of camcorder uses tape cartridges. I have no USB ports on this camcorder.

I would like to connect the camcorder to the computer via tuner card to capture the videos and save them on the computer.

1. What would be the best way to connect the camcorder to computer?

2. Quality is important when capturing the video. Will I lose the quality?

3. What software would I use to capture the video?


Thanks for your help.

[hech54]

S-Video cable from the camera to the Happauge WinTV HVR 1600 would be the easiest. I doubt you will get greatly improved video by capturing to uncompressed or lossless AVI from Hi8 tapes.
You probably have the ability to capture in high bitrate MPEG2 with the Hauppauge card but the result will be too high of a bitrate for DVD. You can save the high bitrate capture to an external HDD then transcode down to DVD bitrate to make DVDs for friends and family.

edit: you will also need an audio connection between the camera and the card since S-Video is "video only".