Hi, please excuse my ramblings but I am new to this Digital Video stuff. I have been doing the digital photography for a few years and creating VCDs to play on my DVD from the photos and videos from the digi cam.

but I am about to be a Dad and my wife wants to get into Digital videoing aswell as the pictures. So........

I have purchased a second hand video (£50 from ebay - it has firewire but that will be a future upgrade) and a DVD drive (£50) for my PC (just waiting for both to arrive). I have a TV card in the PC that has a s-video in, the camera I bought has the s-video out. The computer has a 4gb and a 6gb hard disk. The 6 GB is used for my photography stuff so is completely empty.

My question is can I transfer directly from the tape through the PC and store the video in full on a DVD, then using the DVD library that I will end up with I can edit to get the final video clips I want to keep.

or////

do I need to invest in a larger harddisk drive (every £ counts as the baby is due in 2.5 months) or will the tape to DVD work.

I will obviously have plenty time on my hands when baby arrives (3am, 4am, 5am etc.......)

Thanks in advance.

In truth, I'm not convinced you are going to win with this.

To capture straight onto a DVD to play in a set-top box, which I guess is your intention, you would at the very least need to encode in real time to MPEG2. Cards to do this are not cheap.

But the main thing that worries me is your PC spec. If it has a HDD of (only) 6Gb then this implies to me that the PC is about 5 years old whcih wouold put at about the Pentium 500Mhz era. This is not likely up to the task to be honest.

I susopect most video editing packages would require a heftier PC than this. Especially in the HHD department.

Firewire typically captures to AVI file. Five minutes of raw footage takes about 1Gb of hard drive space, before you edit it. Once you have editied it and built a DVD image ready for burning, the DVD image will be about 4Gb in size for a two hour 'movie'.

I'm suspecting, that you'll likely need a newer/better PC to take up this hobby.

That's if I'm right of course. I (very) often wrong. What is the full spec of your PC?

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hi, thanks for the help, the pc was originally a 300mhz pII but was upgraded to a 2ghz, I just got a second drive rather than a bigger one. Should I go for a 40 - 60 gb (only about £50 ish on ebay) drive for this ? firewire on ebay is about £40. The video in card is a Jetway WinTV card that has s-video in.

thanks

for computer parts and bits then http://www.ebuyer.com is a great place. I use them lots. for Hard disks then

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...aA==&cat_uid=4

quotes a 120 gig HD for £60 but you can get cheaper disks. they also may do video cards/capturers

NOTE: if you buy a hard disk off Ebuyer.com, look at the speed. 5400 RPM is fine for data storage but 7200 RPM is better for programs.

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AMD Athlon64 3000+
48x CD burner
16x Dual Layer DVD burner
512 Mb RAM
Windows XP Pro/Debian unstable
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5
Firewire card
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
2 x 17" CRTs, 1 x 17" TFT

You can buy external DVD-RW drives that can burn directly from the source. Can't remember the make and model, but it has been posted on the forums before. You could also invest in a stand alone DVD recorder and record directly to disc using analogue connections.

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Also, do NOT spend £40 on a firewire card. £20 absolute tops for what you need. e.g. I got a single PCI card with two firewire ports and three USB2 ports on it from DABS.com for under £18. That way you have all you need for analogue and digital transfer in one card

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For firewire cards check out www.amazon.co.uk you can get a nisis 3 port fire wire card for £20 which includes cable and software

For HDD check out www.overclockers.co.uk

Mike

My Leadtek TV2000XP Expert card came with software that lets me do Direct-to-DVD capture, but I haven't tested it yet as I don't have a DVD burner. :(

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AMD Sempron 2600+ (Socket 754; 1.6GHz)
Chaintech VNF3-250
768MB Crucial PC2100 (I know, I really need PC3200 :()
ATI Radeon 9200

Well I have now upgraded some of my Pc.

It is a 1700 processor
Firewire card - £9
120gb drive - £58
JVC GR-D31EK DigiVideo Camcorder -£199
4x DVD re-writer - £50
Pinnicle 8 editing software (Free with DVD writer)

Hopefully I can get omewhere with this. Thanks to all for the help.