Hi,

I'm a total newbie when it comes to video editing and I have a question regarding video capture.

I have a vhs-c camcorder and an adaptor which allows playback of the vhs-c tape on a vhs video. I have recently bought a Panasonic DMRES30 combined VHS recorder/dvd recorder.

I was wondering whether if I copied my footage on my vhs-c tapes onto dvd through my combi machine, would the video editing software see the dvd footage as being editable, as though it had been captured? Or would I need to capture the footage another way? I don't want a straight copy of my camcorder tapes, I want to be able to edit them. I was hoping to copy my tapes to dvd+r, then copy to my hard drive, then edit them and then copy back to dvd.

At present I have no editing software and was thinking of buying Adobe Premiere Elements, is this what you would recommend to someone new to editing?

I have a laptop with the following specs: Dell Inspiron 8600, 1.7 Ghz Pentium M, 512mb RAM, 60Gb Hard Drive, 128Mb GeforceFx 5650 Go running WinXP Home

Your help will be greatly appreciated and if you require any other information I will gladly provide it.

Rhi

you don't have to (and actually shouldn't) transfer first to dvd-r and then capture onto the pc. just capture directly from vhs.
premiere elements would be what you need, but for starters i think you should do fine with windows movie maker, free with winxp.

I don't have any means to capture directly from vhs. It would mean buying a piece of equipment to do that which is why I was wondering if I could do it the vhs-dvd-hd-dvd. But thanks for your input.

it would be VERY trickey! i would suggest spending £50 on a capture card!

Luke is right. Don't make it complicated.

Hi Rhi

The two solutions I would say are yes you could spend whatever amount on an analogue capture card, or copy your vhs onto dvd, put the disk in the computer, make sure it is finalized first or the computer won't see it. Open up the contents of the disc in windows and transfer it onto your hard disk unfortunately this can take a long time depending on how long (big) the video file is. Once it's on the hard disk, right mouse click on the filename and select rename the file and give it a more recognisable name than the one your dvd put on it. Also change the file extension to .avi and (hopefully) that will convert it to a file format you can edit on the pc.