Video Capture device for digital handycam?

Question

My sony mini dv is not compatible with Vista (don't yell at me) on my laptop. I would like to know if there is a video capture device that will capture from my mini dv and then transfer onto my laptop so I can edit the video?

Sony's website offers no support.

Any helpful information is greatly appreciated. I have over 7 hrs of video to edit.

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

Well, you should get a adapter card for your laptop or a special recorder hard drive.....like an FS-4, but they are not cheap, because of the processing power required..

Answer 2

The "DV capture device" for all miniDV tape based camcorders is a firewire port on your computer. If your laptop does not already have a firewire (IEEE1394a, I.LINK, DV) port, hopefully, your laptop has an available expansion slot (PCMCIA or ExpressCard) so you can add one. Then you'll also need an firewire cable. 4-pin for the camcorder DV port; 4 or 6-pin depending on the firewire port on the computer.

Once that firewire port is working, connect the camcorder with the firewire cable using the camcorder's DV port and launch your video editor. MovieMaker will "Capture" the video. Other editors might "Import" the video.

If your laptop does not have a firewire port or PCMCIA or ExpressCard slot, the only other transfer method (other than getting a new computer with appropriate connectivity), would be to get an external "Analog/Digital bridge" like those from

http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSite/us...

Warning: analog video quality will not be as good as digital (firewire) video quality.

Another warning: 7 hours of standard definition video x 14 gig of hard drive space used per hour of imported standard definition video = 98 gig of available hard drive is required. Reccommendation is to use an external drive (minimum of 500 gig) just for the video editing project files.