What do I need to transfer videos to my computer from my camera?

Capturing old vhs/beta/8mm video tapes I have a great tip for you. Lets say you want to capture a old vhs tape and you only have firewire on your computer, no video rca inputs, no problem, dig out your mini dv camera and use it to as a analog to digital converter. The outputs on most mini dv cameras are also inputs! Just run your audio and video cables from your vhs to your camera, use the s video cable if your vhs deck has one, and run a 4 pin firewire from your camera to your computer. The camera must be in play mode, not camera mode! One more step, you have to go to your camera menu and "tell" your camera that you want it to convert the video to digital. Drill down in the menu and you will find something like "vcr setup" hit enter, the scroll down and change av to dv out. Hit play on your vhs vcr and you should now see the video playing on the camera screen. Plug in to your computer firewire, wait a few seconds for the computer to "see" the camera and your ready to capture. Also if your vhs original that you are capturing will not "track" turn off the audio tracking in your vcr menu. Many old tapes, especially long play recordings have a control track that is weak. It confuses the auto tracking and the playback toggles from blue screen to picture. If the audio cuts in and out, switch the audio from hi-fi to normal in the audio setup in the vcr menu, the audio will then be mono but it should stop cutting in and out. Don't bother with a video processor to clean up the signal unless it is a good one, most of the video processors that I have seen under $1000 are junk. One exception is the MX-1 mixer by Videonics, it has a built in time code corrector clock that is a true time code corrector. Any processing of video can be done better with the computer with far more control. Firewire! It the savior of video, before its day video editing was only for the brave. All of us can now achieve great quality capture with no dropped frames thanks to this industry standard.

If you have an analog (VHS) camcorder… You need an analog converter, either internal card or external such as the dazzle. It's very easy to use and come with good software. You would hook your analog VHS camera or VCR to the analog converter, the dazzle and then hook the dazzle to your PC. The dazzle cost around 70.00 , but worth the money if you have a lot of VHS to tapes to convert. **Please Note There is no 8mm or Hi 8 to VHS Adapter that currently exsists. This type of VHS Adapter only exsists with VHS-C tape**

ADS Tech VHS convertor It comes with DVD Xpress and a Capwiz to record from your camera to computer. It takes a little while to get used to it but it's a lot better to have them on DVD seeing how tapes can be eaten. You can get it at Wal-mart for about $50 to $75.

What I did with my old tapes was stuck them into the VHS player and hooked that up to my dvd recorder. There are also dvd recorders that come with a vhs built in. You can just stick the dvd into your computer (considering that your computer has a dvd drive). This is the only way I have ever had experience with. Personally, i don't know any other way but i know there are some that you have to buy a cord to hook up to the computer and do it like that.