Need help on digitising from Sony camcorder!!!

[Attila Karacsonyi]

Need help on digitising from Sony camcorder!!! (CCD-TRV35E)

Please help me decide what kind of card to purchase for digitising Video8 tapes. I have a lot of tapes of my little boy and would like to store them on CD (…maybe to edit them a little). I read about Matrox and ATI cards but You all know how difficult is the decision. Are there any other cards for this task?! PLEASE HELP!
Any opinion is highly appreciated.

Config: PII 350Mhz / 128 Mb SDRAM / IDE UDMA 4.1 Gb HDD / IDE UDMA 3 Gb HDD / Creative Blaster TNT w/ 16 Mb SDRAM / SB Awe64

Thanx!

[bighammer]

there are connectors that you can buy that plug from your camcorder to serial and software decoders like MGI photo suite or the like. They use twain drivers and I use Kodak imaging that comes with win98.
Sorry, that is if you already have a card and was just going to upgrade because of the tapes.
There are many other cards besides the Matrox and ATI.
What else do you do with your system? Games? Which ones?



[This message has been edited by bighammer (edited 02-14-99).]

[MrLuigi]

I use a Dazzle Parallel port adaptor. It makes MPEG-1 files. cost around $180 US.
I have also used the ati-all-in wonder (& pro) both do video capture to AVI files.
Good Luck.

[Attila Karacsonyi]

Hello Bighammer!
Thanks for your replay. You are telling me that there are many digitising cards out there, do you have any suggestion? I plan to buy one but it is a hard decision. What are the main issues to be considered? Hardware/Software compression, format(AVI,MPEG1, MPEG2) sampling…???
Beside I work and play on my computer, I am a graphic artist and doing designs and colour separation for T-shirts, posters, transfers. I even made some animations for a commercial.
Every replay is appreciated!!

[bighammer]

Diamond, just about all, the Canopus line of products,
ATI Expert on up,
Matrox, Elsa, can go on and on. The box will state that it has the Mpeg decoding right on it.
The Dazzle is a nice card, I started with their Snappy. LOL
The thing is, It doesn't matter what card you have if you have a software version.
As I stated above, MGI has a program that will decode your video right to your box.
Sony has the cable.


[This message has been edited by bighammer (edited 02-15-99).]