Ok my camera doesn’t have a USB port… Could I use this to hook my computer up to my camcorder to put videos on here? I want edit my own videos to put on here, so will this work?? Thanks, Kelly.
what kinda camera do you have?
Does your camera have a firewire (IEE1994 I think) port on it?
And does your computer?
If they both do get a cable to connect them or ff not, it might be cheaper to get a firewire card for your computer than that item you linked to.
It looks like it’ll do the job tho.
T.
Here is my camera.
hrmm…well, if it’s a digital camcorder, then there has to be some port on it to connect it to the computer. read the manual, that should help (:
Be there done that, Didn’t help. HMMMMM…
It seems like your camera is an analog device…
(says so in the link)
You’ve got an analog camera. To get the video on the computer you’ll need to do a video capture. Video capture involves plugging the camera into the computer, playing the video in real time, and having the computer capture and digitize each frame as it is played. It is done in real time so it takes 15 minutes to capture 15 minutes of video.
That device from Radio Shack is one way to do video capture. Nothing at the web site for the device mentions whether it is using USB 1 or USB 2. USB 1 would be a potential problem because USB 1 is not fast enough to handle the bandwidth needed to stream quality video. The device would need to cheat and compress the video making it look ugly and lowering the capture quality.
So yes that device will do what you want. You’ll need to find some reviews to see if the video capture quality is very good. Some of those types of devices do a very poor job of video capture.
There are other ways and devices to capture video if that device doesn’t have good enough quality.
Be aware that capturing video will use up a lot of hard drive space. I’ve done video captures where I ended up with a 40 GB file.
Compressing the video in real time will put a strain on your CPU. If you want to do meaningful compression (more than a 2:1 ratio) you’ll need a more powerful CPU (a faster Pentium 4).
Sounds like all this is more complicating than I thought.
I still don’t know what to do. I guess I could buy it and try it out and if it doesn’t work right take it back.?
I have something very very similar and it works fine.
It’s as complicated as you want to make it. I make it complicated because I like good results, the best that I can manage to get without buying a lot of extra gear.
Those devices like you linked to are generally the easiest way to do video capture. You just have to be careful that the device doesn’t try to cheat too much and compress the video or lower the frame rate of the video before it gets to your computer. Check reviews for those types of devices and try to find one that other people are happy with and happy with the results.
I’ve got a video card that has TV style video input plugs. I can plug a VCR or analog camera into the video card and watch the video on the computer monitor or set it up to capture the video. It’s a little more complicated that way because you have to deal with getting the right video drivers installed that support the video capture and there’s other details that need to be worked out. It’s a bit more complicated to get set up and now that I’ve got it all set up I’m reluctant to update my video driver for fear of breaking the video capture capability. The plug in devices like that device at Radio Shack should avoid those kinds of setup problems and the bundled software should make the process of video capture easier.