Last year, I heard one of my colleague asked me about transferring a video tape, a mini DV actually, in to a DVD. Immediately I reflected upon my days in Melbourne. I actually did that with my mini DV Camcoder after me and the family went out for an outing to the scenic Melbourne and outer Melbourne.

It was a tedious process and requires specific hardware and tools in order to do so. During that time, I used a firewire cable to connect the camcorder with my notebook. I was lucky to have a built in firewire port so I can straight away transfer the video. The transfer process also demands a lot of memory resources and a large disk space. So, RAM is at least 1 GB and free space of at least 40GB. For a PC, a firewire card is required, if not, the video cannot be transferred to the PC.

As for software, Pinnacle Studio is the best! Easy to use and the output is almost professional! The only challenge is that the video transfer will take as long as the video it self. If it is a 60 minutes video, then the transfer will take the same time to be transferred to the disk.

Now, one does not need to have a firewire card. Thanks to USB, we cannow use a USB video capture device. Just like the one that we have in the office. The model name is Pinnacle DVC 150. This is an older model that we have. By using this device, we just need to connect the camcorder to the DVC, then the DVC can be connected directly to a computer or to a VCR or a DVR. One prevalent advantage of using the USB DVC is that the conversion is done in the device it self and not one of our office. Therefore, the computer's resources will not be affected too much during the conversion stage. So, the risk of PC to crash or simply frozen is now reduced.

There are now a lot of USB devices like the Pinnacle DVC. In Lelong.com.my, the termed as usb video grabber.

Wanna know more, I'd be glad to show you how to do it :)