Can a capture card be added to a laptop? I'm planning on transferring home vhs movies to DVD. I'll be playing the tapes on a standard vhs player & editing, burning to DVD in my laptop.
After looking around a bit (should've done that b4 posting right) I see I'll need an external box. Which external capture box is the best for about $100.00 or less? I'll be trying to transfer home vhs movies to dvd. I don't have any interest in it having a tv tuner. I have Adobe Premier Elements for video editing. I'm looking for something easy to connect to my laptop, i394, USB2.0, S-video ports.
Hello jstin, Me and my girl just spent the entire weekend trying to figure out how to transfer her home movies. The answer is quite simple really, simple but not necessarily convenient. Most mini-DV camcorders can actually be set up as a pass-through for analog to digital. If you have one (or can borrow one from a friend) then all you have to do is plug the VCR into the camcorder and plug the camcorder into your computer (and you'll also have to go into the camera's menu and switch the AV-to-DV option to on--just look on the camera's documentation) and you're done. Now if you can't get access to one, then I'm afraid I've been no help to you at all.
I actually tried that with no luck. I borrowed my father-in-laws digital camcorder. I couldn't get it to pass through & don't think i had the right cables. I'm not convinced that it can't be done though. I usually take the approach that if I have something productive that I can do myself and not pay someone else to do it, I can justify a new techno toy. I'm not sure this qualifies though, not all that fun, I sure hope it's shinny
Canopus makes very good USB capture devices. Most USB capture devices though output (just like the camcorder option mentioned) to DV AVI which has a very large file size (25GB per hour). Also once it is transferred to your computer you will have to encode to a DVD compliant MPGE2 file.
