I have an early generation hitachi mini dvd camcorder that does not have a firewire connection. how can i capture the video of my kids form the mini dvd and get it into an editing software. i tried pinnacle studio 9 with out luck. is there a software program available that will capture directly from the mini dvd? please help. the kids are growing up fast!

[MarkE19]

With a DVD camcorder you don't 'capture' the video to a PC as such, you just put the DVD disc in your DVD drive and 'rip' it to the HDD.
Once on the HDD you can then load the video files into an editing package that is compatable with DVD formated files, but not all of the well known ones can do this. I think Ulead Video Studio 8 can, but you will need to check. Full details and a 30 day free demo download can be found at www.ulead.com

Mark.

Yes Mark is indeed correct - if you get yourself a trial copy of Ulead Video Studio 8 ( http://www.ulead.co.uk/vs/runme.htm ) you just put the mini DVD in your PC DVD tray and within UVS select import DVD and your video will be transferred to your PC for editing adding titles, music etc and burning to DVD.

There are very special deals on version 8 at the moment because version 9 will be released in less than a month - you could choose to wait if you wish but V9 will almost certainly be sold at full price

you guys are awesome. a final note as i am not only a novice to this field but computers in general. to "rip" the mini dvd to HDD (hard drive i'm assuming) do i need a ripping software like smartripper or do i basically just copy the data to my hard drive using a basic dvd copy software? secondarily, is this software that can do it comparable with pinnacle studio and others that you often hear and read about? if not would i be better off selling the recorder on ebay and going to a typical mini dv or super 8? your thoughts....

You could indeed use a programme like smartripper but since your DVDs will have no copyright protection on them you should be able to just use "My Computer" to copy the .vob files from the DVD to your hard drive - then rename the files from #####.vob to #####.mpg and import them into any editing programme you have. Ulead videostudio just does that bit for you automatically - you can then do all the other functions like edit and add titles etc. exactly as you can in Pinnacle. I would suggest you give your camera a good try first - as said previously you can get a free one month trial of UVS8 to try it out - or try Pinnacle after renaming the files - would have been better if you had bought a mini-DV in the first place but you have the DVD one now so give it a good trial - you may well be happy with it.