Copying DVD footage to PC?

[Daverey2]

Hi
Not sure I'm on the correct forum, but here goes.

I'm not very techie and the world of using a PC to edit camcrder footage and stuff is brand new to me.

I currently have a very high end PC and a firewire card, and have jst managed to master capturing camcorder footage correctly.

What I am wondering is - is it possible to link p a DVD player to the PC using the firewire card, and capture film footage as avi or mpeg files??

Dave

[MarkE19]

Well there are a couple of options for getting the video off a DVD and onto your PC.

The easiest would be to put the DVD disk into a DVD drive on the PC and then with software from many of the companies that do editing software you can edit the files, as long as they are not encripted/copy protected. There is no real reason to convert them back to AVI as this will result in a long delay for the conversion and a loss of quality. If you do want to convert the files though this can also be done with a large range of software.

Some DVD recorders have a DV port that can be connected to a PC to transfer the footage by firewire.

From a standard DVD player you could connect it via the composite or S-Video outputs (plus those for stereo audio of course) to either an analogue capture card or a Canopus ADVC box that then connects to the PC via firewire.

If you have a camcorder with AV-in enabled (note AV-in and not just DV-in) then you could connect the DVD player as above to it and then use the cam as a converter to get the footage onto the PC via firewire.

Mark.