Hi all you experts out there ....

I am a total newbie looking to start capturing / editing my Hi8 recorded material. I have a Sony (Digital TRV110E which has a firewire port, and a bunch of recorded Hi8 tapes of my daughters early years.

I basically wnat to capture all the material on my PC and burn to DVD (preferably with some professional looking menu's titles etc).

Whilst I have a relatively new PC (IBM T42 thinkpad) it probably isn't a good idea to use this for the job. So what I need is a shopping list for Xmas which includes :

A new desktop with loads of drive space / RAM etc / firewire port.
Some video capturing software (Adobe 6, Ulead, Pinnacle ???? advice please .... I might use this for creating other DVD's as well so want the best)
A DVD writer (can this be built into the PC to avoid having it external ?)
Anything I've missed ?

Thanks for any help ...........

Ok im not an expert.......
but i have made a couple of short films.
If you buy a pc and it doesnt allready have a dvd writer then you can replace this with one of your dc drives fairly easily.
I use Pinnacle Studio 8 to edit with althought you can probably pick up version 9 for the same price now.
Personally i have trouble copying the final product to dvd with pinnacle as it takes up to 2 hours for about 30 mins....so i make a dvd movie file usually mpeg and then use other software to actually make the dvd menu`s and burn it to dvd.
I have bieng using Ulead DVD movie factory 2 which is ok, but if you want to go into more detail with you menu`s then i`d go for dvd-lab!
Hope that may be of some help if you have any questions just post back!

Thanks for your help,

I will try and get something working over the Xmas break, and will buy DVD Lab .... do I still need Pinnacle to do the capture however ?

Cheers

Ye you would have to get pinnacle because as far as i know you cant capture with DVD-Lab