Hi.
I've just bought an Adaptec Videoh! CD, a very cheap USB capture device to get some hi8 home movies onto disk, add music and titles and stuff. It comes with something called showbiz to edit the video. The adaptec manual and website don't answer many questions, so...
1.What's the best way to capture my hi8 footage? I just turn on my camera and click on capture which gives me one huge file. I was intending to cut this into little clips but I can't work out how to do this. I shouldn't I be manually stopping and starting the camcorder creating short clips as I go, should I?
2. The files are AVI format. This is huge! Is there a freeware utility or something in Showbiz (if anyone knows it) to convert to Mpeg.
3. I'm in the UK. I don't know what settings to use for capture. It should be PAL right, but there's different PAL options? PAL(M) etc. The manual tell me not to meddle with the other default settings but the frame rate stays at 29.97 or something. Shouldn't I change this to 25 if I'm capturing in PAL format.
Many thanks if you can answer any of these. I'm a total novice to this but I do a lot of work, sometimes paid work, using audio apps like Cubase and Wavelab, so I thought it would be, well, similar and it aint! It does mean I have a well specced machine though. P4 2.6Ghz, 512M RAM, 128 M Video Card, 120G Seagate Barracuda HD.

First off all: USB is bleeeeh... You'd be better off buying yourself a cheap TV card like Pinacle or Haupauge WinTV. With that you can record the files to the HD with a SVHS-cable for the best quality.
Anyway, to awsner your questions:

1. You should try to get the hang of a program called VirtualDub. (www.virtualdub.org). It's a very handy tool when it comes to capturing and basic video editing/resizing. There are plenty of tutorials for VirtualDub available on the web.
2. AVI is indeed a large format but for Hi8 it's the most common way to record lossless video to the HD. If you want to save some space you could convert the avi files to MPEG using TMPGEnc (www.tmpgenc.com).
U can also convert the files to Lossless WMV with Windows Media Encoder (www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia).
3. The framerate should always be 25fps since you live in Europe and Europe uses PAL. It's probably due to the USB thingy being an American product or something that it converts your framerate to 29.97fps. Try to find out wether you can change the settings of that USB thingy. Or just buy yourself a cheap TV card and a SVHS cable right away for the best results. All of my movies (www.streettrickz.com) are made that way. (And I just leave all the footage in AVI and back it up to a DVD when I'm done...)

And indeed, video editing is totally diferent to Audio editing. Meaning that I don't know didly squat about audio editing myself... :P

Bob,

I create clips in Showbiz from the one large AVI file.

First, you have to Add 'Media' file toward the right side. For my Showbiz, I click on the red book. This could take just a bit, but you will see your avi file in the list of 'Media' available for your Showbiz project.

Second, you just click and drag that avi to each segment, at the bottom. I then clip, beginning and end, accordingly, so as to create chapters, which I do later in MyDVD.

You can create the Mpeg2 in several ways. Look at the 'Make Movie' button, or the 'Create' button.

Hope this helps.
Chet

PS. Warning: I'm having some quality problems, as you can see by my earlier post. Thinking about TMPGenc possibly.