Connecting Camcorder to PC?

Question

I did not buy my camcorder but it has those cords that have the yellow video, red and white audio. I can connect it to my tv and make dvds and I can get it on my computer using my TV Tuner, but the quality is c**p once it goes through the tuner. Is there some sort of cable or cord that I can connect my camcorder to my computer with? Thanks.

Answer 1

USB videoconverter should give you better quality than tv tuner, try this one:

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/S...

but remember one thing - the resulting quality could be only as good as the source (actually ALWAYS a bit worse). So analog videotape/camera (aka VHS-C or Hi8) will give you always only VHS tape quality.. that will look watchable on Tv, but very grainy and crappy on computer monitor.

Convert it into VCD (mpeg1) which has quality of videotape - no loss in that case - one CD takes 80 minutes. Most if not all stand-alone DVD players could play it and watch it on tv, not on computer monitor. You cannot add quality, all computer enhancements are only surface tricks aka brightness and contrast and color etc., but the reality is, that computer cannot create missing information and crappy source will give you crappy result.

If your cam is so called miniDV, that the included cable is ONLY for watching on tv, NOT for transferring to the computer. In that case, go and get Firewire cable (+firewire card if your comp does not have one). Use that to transfer video, you get extremely high quality AVI file of 12 GB per one hour of recording. That you need to convert into DVD files and burn on DVD - the highest quality (8000Mbps) gives you only one hour per DVD, or of course, you can lower the bitrate to fit more on it. Like 6000Mbps - one and half hour, the human eye will not likely see the difference. For longer than 1.5 hrs use double layer or two discs or lower quality more... your choice:-)

It is not good idea to create DVD files from captured analog video (VHS-C etc.) because as I said, computer cannot create missing info and you are just blowing up low quality picture into huge file. Do VCD rather. But it will not harm anyone of course, so you can try:-)...

Answer 2

Get a USB cord and start upload them to your computer.