What do I REALLY need to get started?

[KDayton]

Hi:

Busy mom here at Christmas trying to get 10 years of family videos from Sony analog Hi8 to DVD in the quickest, cheapest possible manner. Borrowed a system from work including fast CPU (I think), Firewire card, DVD burner, video editing/authoring software (though I'm not sure which). I've only got it for 2 weeks!

What else do I need? Best Buy tried to sell me an expensive, complete package that included some things I already have. It seems like I just maybe need a cable that has the white/red/yellow connection on one end for the video camera and a USB connection on the other? Yes? No? I just learned in your forum that I might be able to run my analog Hi8 tapes directly in a digital Hi8 camera to the Firewire card...if I can find a friend with one to borrow, perhaps. What other options are there for me? Keep in mind cheap and quick.

Also, after I capture, I don't need anything special -- no editing or anything, just direct to DVD+R, with automatic placeholders or something. I hope someone can help. Thanks.

[PlaiBoi]

You have 2 options here. Either capture the analog video using a capture card, or baroow that Digital8 camera of your friends and capture using that. Does that system you got have a capture card? If not, then consider option 2. With the Digital8 camera youll need a firewire cable to connect to the camera and to your PC. Then you can just convert the analog to digital using the camera and transfer to your PC.

[KDayton]

Thanks. I do not have a video capture board in the system. What about these options I've heard about...

An adapter called the Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge to connect the analog video camera to the Firewire card?

A dongle to attach the analog video camera to the USB port?

Are these reasonable possibilities?

Thanks for your input.

[bugster]

The Dazzle DV-bridge or other similiar products would probably be a reasonable choice for you. This will capture your video in DV-format Avi which is lightly compressed. Make sure you have plenty of free disc space as one hour of video is about 13 Gigs. You also need to make sure your PC is running win2k or XP with the NTFS file system or you will have problems with the $gig filesize limit of the Fat32 filesystem on win9x.

So now you have your home video in avi format on your PC and you need a quick and simple way of getting this to DVD. I assume you will want it to play in a standalone player and are not just using DVD as a digital storage fomat?

Although not the best quality possible, one of the consumer DVD authoring packages with a built in encoder will do the job. Many people on this board swear by ULEAD DVD Workshop for authoring and I believe it has a reasonable built in encoder so importing video and getting it onto your DVD should be a simple process. There are also others that will do the job. Again you will need more disk space, at least 5 gigs for temporary files before the disk is burned. Also beware that encoding is SLOOOOOW process and is likley to take several hours for each hour of video, then another 1-2 hours to author and burn, so this is not going to be quick.

Hope this helps.

[LloydAZ]

Thanks. I do not have a video capture board in the system. What about these options I've heard about...

An adapter called the Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge to connect the analog video camera to the Firewire card?

A dongle to attach the analog video camera to the USB port?

Are these reasonable possibilities?

Thanks for your input.

The Hollywood DV-Bridge costs about $199 U.S. and comes with Dazzle DVD Complete to author your DVD's.