I am a complete newbie, very quick help here please?

david gardner · 19-02-2006, 2:14 PM

After having my first daughter, I am looking to buy a camcorder that I can hook up to my PC and edit it to my hearts content. I have searched various online stores but need to know what type of camera can actually be hooked to a PC. Can any DV camera be hooked up? I have an old sony one knocking about. Do I need digital DV? I dont need an in depth answer, just a clue so I know what type of camera I am looking for?

Sorry to be a pain.

MarkE19 · 19-02-2006, 2:42 PM

Any camcorder can be hooked up to a PC if the PC has the right sort of connections. However, to make life easier then stick to a digital camcorder, and this means any DV cam as DV is Digital. You could also look at Digital8 or microMV, but these are not that widely available and DV is considered to be the best.
By the sounds of it you will be doing a bit of editing of what you record and therefore it is best to avoid the DVD camcorders as editing can be problematic with the highly compressed files that are written to a DVD disc. However if you just want something that is very simple to use and just have a DVD for watching from then they may be a good choice.

Good luck,
Mark.

Snubtray · 19-02-2006, 2:46 PM

If you do get a camera to hook up to your PC, and you go down the DV route, make sure you have an IEEE 1394 (or Firewire or iLink - they're all the same) port on your PC; if you don't they are not expensive to buy, nor difficult to install.

david gardner · 19-02-2006, 2:46 PM

Cheers, exactly what I need. DV it is then. I'll ask the software question when I buy one, but I am sure it will come with basic stuff.

Snubtray, can I not use USB?

MarkE19 · 19-02-2006, 3:35 PM

Yes, you can use USB but will loose a lot of quality. Firewire is the only way to get a 100% quality copy of the video onto a PC.

Mark.

MarkE19 · 19-02-2006, 3:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by david gardner

Cheers, exactly what I need. DV it is then. I'll ask the software question when I buy one, but I am sure it will come with basic stuff.

Nope, the supplied software with just about all camcorders is a complete waiste of time for capture & editing. AFAIK the Sony software will only allow USB capture (see my last post) and therefore will only allow you to create low quality output.
The good news is that the chances are you have a very good program as part of the OS on your PC. Windows XP comes with a program called Movie Maker and a bit of help and advice on useing this program can be found Here. You will however need another program such as Nero to burn the footage to DVD.

Mark.

**senu** · 19-02-2006, 5:09 PM

Nero Vision comes with the full version of Nero not oem version . If you can get Nero 7, Nero vision 4 is fairly well featured and can help you get from video capture to DVD with or without WMM

See here as well for info on WMM