I have read many of these threads and have come to recognize your comments as "voice of experience-like". As such, I have spent the last two days doing the following (all in an effort to get MiniDV off of my Sony Handycam (DCR-HC30) onto my computer and into DVD format.
1) bought and installed 250G hard drive (installed as slave -- nothing to be placed on it but video -- it's sitting empty now).
2) am going to CompUSA tonight to buy Firewire card to install in PC. I looked at the ATI Wonder Video Capture, but it had no i.Link or IEEE1394 port--hmmm... (I probably don't need all of the functionality that comes with this -- tell me if you think that this approach has a downside).
3) Have already bought downloaded TMPGEnc 3.0 Xpress and TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6. Have read good things about this suite for capture/edit/encoding.
4) I have Nero, but it's only 5.5. I've only used it for burning audio CDs. I don't know if I can use it for burning -or- if I should just get Nero 6 and be done with it--you tell me.
That is really it. Let me know if there are any additional things that you can suggest. I did read a heated discussion regarding analog vs digital downloading off of the camcorder. You seem to fall out on the analog side. I'm not too technical, so I'll ask -- when using the ATI Wonder card, what is the port that you use (from both devices)-- SVIDEO?
Thanks in advance to anyone who can provide input.
A Firewire card is a generic piece of equipment. It is not limited to digital video and you can use it to connect all kinds of hardware. Nevertheless, probably 99% of the people use it for transfer of digital video. This is why many vendors market their cards as ?video capture card? by bundling it with video editing software (and many of them are crap) Don't let this fool you, it is still a simple $20 Firewire card. Unless you are convinced that the video editing software that comes along with it is worth the extra money, there is no need to spend more than $20-$30.
I don't know what you meant with "You seem to fall out on the analog side" (sorry, I am not native English speaking), but I do NOT capture through analog; I always use Firewire, so buying the ATI capture card that you mention would not be my choice?
Looking at what you have got so far:
A large HD: that's good. You'll need it.
TMPGENc Xpress and DVD author: good choice, good encoder and reasonable DVD authoring program
Nero 5.5: OK, you can use it to burn your Video-DVD's, but you can also burn them directly with the tool that is included in TMPGEnc DVD Authoring (vs. 1.5)
So, get yourself a Firewire card and a decent video editing program and you're ready to roll...
