Transfer home videos from camcorder to harddrive

burdenedgnome

I have an older Sony digital camcorder DCR-TRV22E. I would like to transfer my videos to a hard drive. I bought a Panasonic DVR for this but it does not have a firewire or AV input. The USB on the camcorder only uploads from SD card in camcorder and not from tapes.

A google search found that a device called a Pinnacle Studio MovieBox will do the job of converting DV or AV to USB. Box is $150 in USA and I can not find it this side of atlantic. Pinnacle do produce a product called Dazzle available in UK but it is analogue inputs only and I would like to use the firewire and digital output when camcorder has it.

Any one any bright ideas? Should I just look for an old computer or DVR with firewire input?

BSOH

I think your tapes are miniDV, so you should be able to play them back through any miniDV camcorder with a Firewire output, for example, the Canon MV750i of about 10 years ago. Then connect the Canon output to the Firewire input of a PC running an excellent free piece of software called WinDV. That will produce a very large AVI file, about 13GB per hour of tape. It's that large because it's an almost uncompressed version of the tape record. If that's too large, you can use AVIdemux (free) to compress it to an mp4 of about 10% the size with reasonable quality (the more you compress, the smaller the filesize but the worse the quality). Compression of about 3:1 using AVStoDVD (free) to an mpeg2 file will preserve nearly all the quality while leaving editing a lot easier than with mp4.

The above worked for me (in my case, I was actually converting the analogue output from an 8mm tape camcorder, which the MV750i is able to digitize in its pass-through ADC mode). Your main problem may be getting your hands on an MV750i or similar - a minDV camcorder with a Firewire output.

burdenedgnome

Thanks for advice. The tapes are miniDV and camcorder has firewire output. It might make sense to get a computer with firewire input and DVD burner. Once files are on a harddrive I could transfer them elsewhere.

BSOH

Ask around, shouldn't be too hard to find even a learner geek in possession of a PC with a Firewire (= IEEE1394) input. Even if the PC doesn't, the cost of a basic PCI IEEE1394 card is way less than €20, provided there is an empty PCI slot in the PC, and any half-competent local computer shop should be able to install it quickly. Do yourself a favour and forget the DVD -WinDV will produce a big file that is far easier to put on a portable hard drive or suitable SDHC card or USB stick. A DVD takes quite a while to burn, or to read, and would hold only about 20 minutes of converted tape at full resolution.

BSOH

Whoa, just remembered that most portable hard drives, SD cards, and USB sticks are formatted as FAT32, so they have a 4GB filesize limit (much the same as a DVD).

Solution: a portable hard drive can certainly be reformatted as NTFS, thus removing that 4GB filesize limit. However, it's not such a great idea for SD cards or USB sticks - see w w w.howtogeek.com/177529/htg-explains-why-are-removable-drives-still-using-fat32-instead-of-ntfs/ (To get around automatic censor, delete the spaces between the "w"s
)
But I sense that you might not be comfortable with all that computer stuff!

burdenedgnome

You're right. I haven't a clue on AV stuff! I think it is time to encourage one my sons to become a useful geek instead of wasting time on xbox! Time to replace the old desktop with a newer (but not brand new) model or build a computer. Laptops are a bit limited for this kind of stuff.

burdenedgnome

After further consideration I decided to buy Pinnacle Studio Moviebox. It seems to be a discontinued product but amazon had 6 left. It has a variety of inputs including firewire but not HDMI. Review seemed good overall. I asked IT guy who recommended a Hauppage product but none on website support Firewire. I could have gotten a cheap analogue converter that would have worked for low resolution but wanted to retain digital integrity. I may still get a DVR to transfer files to but this device gives me more flexibility (I hope).

burdenedgnome

Pinnacle studio moviebox worked perfectly straight out of the box. installed the software from DVD, plugged it in with serial cable (provided) and it read Sony recorder with firewire cable (also provided). I now have hours ahead of me downloading and editing videos. It is a cool piece of kit. I guess Pinnacle discontinued because so few of us still use old firewire cameras ... but there is nothing wrong with it and I always have tapes as a backup. I can see myself stuffing youtube with my old building videos to occupy the dark winter evenings ahead!