I have a Canon ES75 Hi8 and I would like to convert everything on the tapes to DVD. I don't know how to do that or where to start. What do I need? What do I have to buy to do this? Any information is greatly appreciated.
first you need a tuner card to capture the video from your camera into the computer. There are the internal PCI tuner cards and also the external usb 2.0 tuner cards. You would connect the video/audio rca plugs from the camera into the tuner card, then it would capure the video into the hard drive. It's best to capture the video as a mpeg2, this gives you the best quality and is very easy to edit (frame accurate). The best software for editing mpeg2 is womble mpeg video dvd (it is a lossless editor when dealing with mpeg2). A good tuner card to get is the hauppagauge brand cards that have "built-in hardware mpeg2 encoders". The hardware encoders use the tuner card to compress the video(instead of the cpu), this gives you the best performance especially on a lowend pc. (no drop frames). I have the hauppagauge pvr-150, it has served me well.
