Capturing analogue to digital video

You may have and old analogue camcorder or perhaps and old video deck and you fancy putting your old home movies onto DVD format.

Well there are a number of ways to do this depending on your budget:

TV and Graphics Cards
The cheapest way to convert analogue footage to digital may be to get yourself a Tv Capture/Graphics Card, these allow you to connect your VCR or Analogue Camcorder via an S-Video connection and the audio via your PCs sound card/TV card.
A fast PC is required a reasonably fast processor (Pentium 4 ideally) for higher resolution video (anything above 320*240), for example an ATI All-in-one 9600 on a P4 can capture up to 720x480 up to 30 frames per second.

Analogue to Digital Converter
For the best results a dedicated analogue to digital converter is the recommend option, depending on budget most of the leading brands such as Canopus, Matrox, Avid, Pinnacle have such products which because they are dedicated take much off the burden away from the computers CPU

To summarise, analogue to digital conversion is ideal for those on a budget where quality is not of paramount importance. Taking you VHS recordings and transferring them to DVD format will offer an extension to the short life of old VHS material to.

About the Author

Founder of http://wwww.avmechanic.co.uk a Free Video Editing and Computer help community covering a wide range of topics.