How do I save video from my video camera to my computer?

Question

I have a Canon video recorder and I was wondering how I can save this video onto my computer so I can import it to Windows Movie Maker to make a movie. There is an option on WMM that says 'capture from device'. Does this have anything to do with connecting my camera to the computer with a USB cord? I've tried importing video by simply putting a finalized disc into the CD drive but it just plays it. How do I import? Help!

Answer 1

Hmm... from your description, you seem to have a DVD-based camcorder (it doesn't hurt one bit to specifiy both make and model when asking for help). If I'm parsing "Canon video recorder" wrong, and it's something other than a camcoder, this may not help.

DVD camcorders deliver video as, well, a more-or-less playable DVD... "Capture from Device" is usually just for video capture from a video driver (mini-DV camcorder, etc), it generally doesn't apply to DVD camcorders.

Most modern video editors have a DVD-specific import function for editing video from DVD camcorders, but Windows Movie Maker (at least the version on my PC) doesn't seem to. You might run Windows Update to see if there's a newer version.

Another option is to "rip" your DVD to a standard MPEG-2 file on disc, which can then be used directly by WMM and most other Windows video editing programs. There are a number of free programs that can do this... the simplest is probably VOB2MPEG:

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/VOB2MPG

Another is VobEdit, which you can find here:

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/VobEdit

And if you didn't notice, both of these reference the site http://www.videohelp.com, which has a number of "how to" guides for doing just about anything in video, lists of free and commercial video tools with reviews, etc.