What is needed to do this? I hope not any new hardware. Any chance an adapter exist that can be hooked up from the video camera to the USB ports instead of needing a new card.

If anyone has done this before, I would greatly appreciate the steps on how to do so.

Thanks!

Some vid cameras do have a USB hook up. If not some sound cards also have a vid hook up. I use a program that came with my Sound Card/Video card. ATI. It basically play the vid from the source(video hooked up to the puter) You can save certain segment of it on the entire thing if you room, as simple as "save as" feature.

You can also do this if you have the full version of RealPlayer(cost is about $39). It actually gives you a choice of AVI, MPEG, or RM media. The ATI program only does .AVI RM actually compresses the video a lot better. I haven't been able to figure out how to resize the screen area though.

How long a video?

I own a video production company and can do this for you.  Give me a holler at [email protected]

Bulldog out

Look first to your video camera -- if it cannot do it, then you are stuck buying new hardware.  In that case, you need a video capture card.  

A good choice is the Dazzle Video Creator 2 ($260-300).  Hauppage also makes a good capture card.

Justin

The ATI TV Wonder USB can be used to hook your VCR to your USB port.  They are kind of expensive (approx $80).  I have seen noname USB adapters for about $40, but you can get a ATI TV Wonder VE PCI card for about $50.  The cheapeast solution might be to get a $19 surplus Hauppauge capture card.  They are not so good, but they work.

I used to use various ATI boards to capture, but switched to Videum last year.  [url]www.winnov.com[/url]

As mentioned, you can get USB adaptors. Basically these are those web cameras with the web camera sawed off, video and audio input on one end and a USB connector on the other end. You plug the svideo or composite video into one end, and record the USB output on the other end.

Most of the dohickeys sold like this have primitive software for recording. If you want to do fancy editing you can get a copy of Adobe Premire.

The hardware/software interface for most video recording is pretty flakey. I was trying to do some recording at a conference last week, and there was no end to the problems.

Do what I did.  Go out and buy the Intel PRO PACK PC camera.
Its just a pc cam that mounts to the top of your monitor.  It has a 10ft cord and can be mounted to a camera tripod [b]AND[/b] it has a Video jack in the back of it.  It does the sound through your existing sound card.

The softwear that comes with it is a complet production studio (not really but is really complete)
Plus you gain a quick snapshot camera for taking pictures of things you want to send via e-mail or to post a quick pic on a forum.

I bought a 20 ft video cord that goes from my VCR to the pc cam.  I can watch TV ot movies through it and/or capture moments from TV/movies.
Its about $80 or now even less and you get a camera out of it, unlike the capture cards.


BISHOP