Evening all….

I found a load of MiniDV tapes in the attic, what is the cheapest, easiest way to convert them to DVD?

These ones…

In laymans terms do i need to link the camcorder to a high end PC, use some mystical software to convert the tapes to a video format then burn them to DVD?

Trouble is I dont have a tidy PC only a crap 6 year old Dell laptop…

Any suggestions welcome….

oh i also want to edit them and put in basic voice over etc as most of the tapes are trip dear old departed dad made with mum when the went to new zealand.

cheers

Mini dv shouldn’t need a beasty pc. You’ll prob need a FireWire cable/port. I used to get by with windows movie maker 🙂

cheers,

sorry for being dull, what the hell is a firewire?

aaahhhh im being lazy….

if i got one of these to stick in the laptop…

then one of these to connect camcorder to laptop…

do you have an old DV camcorder ? you’re going to need one to play the tape in the first place. ebay has plenty of such things. just make sure it has DV out.

the best way to get the video into the PC is by a firewire port from the camcorder to the PC. your old dell laptop may have one – most older dell laptops did

firewire transfers the footage from the tape into the Pc without loss or conversion. flip side is that a DV file is quite large ( 174 mb per min or something like that ) … but its also easy to work with as the compression is very basic, and not too taxing for an older PC to do**

Editing it is simple enough with the like of Movie maker in windows. it does a decent enough job … although I found it didn’t handle MP3 music all that great.

I personally like the DV file format … its decent quality, quick and easy to edit and is a great match for DVD output.

** the more compression, the slower it is to work with files … which is why HD footage and more modern stuff needs more powerful PC’s cause the compression is so complex. )

You capture them into vegas, movie maker, FCP etc. via a camera or deck with Firewire, edit them, then output to the format of your choice. Output an archive copy back to tape and keep the original tapes.
It’s worth getting a fast firewire HD to capture the footage too.

An AV company could do it for you.

You could stick with your PC and purchase software and hardware that might or might not work.

you could buy a new PC and decent edit software or just use movie maker for no thrills and potentially lots of hassle.

and seeing as you dont know what firewire is

Maybe a mac mini with final cut express would probably be the least frustrating solution. We teach grannies how to use this in about 30 minutes.