Camcoder with DV and thats it...

[trouby]

Hey,

Where do I find the basic of how to transfer a movie from my camcoder to my pc,

I only know that I have a DV exit on my camcoder (a digital sony one) and thats it!

Do I need some extra hardware on my PC for that? how do I connect my camcoder to the pc? which cable?

its like the forum talks about anything but not about the basic steps required to transfer the recoded film to an AVI file.

Sorry for the silly quesitons,
I just don't have any knowledge about this issue. :)

Thanks a lot.

[bb]

You need a firewire cable and a firewire card in your PC (or onboard firewire). Then you need a capture software which might come with your firewire card (light versions of video editors most of the time). There are some links to free DV capture programs in the sticky threads.

Watch out for a cheap firewire cable. There are big and small connectors available for each side, so check what plugs you have and buy the right one. Usually there's a small connector on the camcorder side, a big one on firewire cards, and probably a small one on laptops having onboard firewire. If you need to buy a firewire card, just get a cheap one, but make sure a firewire cable is included. It may become expensive if you have to buy it separately.

You simply plug the stuff together (it's really just that one cable), set your camcorder to play mode, and capture the DV stream with your DV capture program. You can even remote control your camcorder through the capture software, like play/pause, rewind, etc.

Hope that helps,

bb

[trouby]

Thanks for the answers,

Ahmm, I have a plug on my laptop with a label of "1394" this is the firewire plug? let me know :)
and if it is, that means it's enough and I can go buy a firewire cable and i'm ready by the hardware side?

Also, I could see that there are lots of differences between the firewire cards, what are the differences? different cards can give differen quality? or it only depends on the codecs?

Thanks.

[Babeinternational]

Yes, this is this one. Get a cable and you have everything.
There is no difference between 2 firewire cards (as long as they have the same number of ports...), so the cheapest, the best. Usually the price increases when they "give" you software with it.

[Jazz]

To build on that: quality does not depend on the card since what you get is a 1:1 digital copy being transfered from the camcorder tape to your PC. However once the date is on your PC, the used codec can make a difference: check out this great thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33526) for a comparison.

For what it's worth - I've encountered quite some problems getting my Sony camcorder hooked up to my PC. In my own very humble opinion, here's the order to follow for troubleshooting:
1. firewire cable - happens regularly, try with a different one
2. PC setup/software - shouldn't normally be an issue if you're on 2000 or XP, but I've read a lot about problems on earlier Win flavors.
3. camcorder firewire port (or "iLink" in Sony lingo) - this turned out to be the problem in my case, which I found out by testing in my local SonyCenter.