I want to transfer video tapes from my son's childhood onto my desktop and do some basic edits in Movie Maker before storing them on my HDD. My plan is to then back them up to an external drive for redundancy.
Most of the tapes are Mini DV (recorded on a SONY TRV33 circa 2003), but there are also several video 8 cassettes and a few full size VHS cassettes. The problem is that I cannot do a direct transfer to my computer from the camcorder via USB.
Here are the alternatives that I have found regarding the Mini DV tapes:
1. Use a firewire (I Link) cable. Of course neither my laptop nor my desktop (both PCs) have a firewire port.
2. Use a video capture device like this from Elgato https://www.elgato.com/en/video/video-capture, or this Blackmagic https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/intensity. If I go this route will there be any loss of picture quality from transferring data with the composite signal?
3.Use my wife's laptop (also PC) which does have a firewire port, but it has very limited storage space so I would need to transfer one tape to her computer then transfer the file to my desktop and delete the file from her hard drive. There are a lot of tapes so it would mean she would not have access to her computer during these transfers. I'd prefer to avoid this.
4. Use my son's 3+ year old 13" Mac Book Pro. He really won't need his computer until he leaves for college in late August so this would be a convenient choice, but from the videos that I have seen on youtube, it appears that this would require some version of iMovie which is not on his computer. I can buy the app but I don't know if there is a compatibility issue with an older camera and a new version of iMovie. I've never done a file transfer from a mac to a PC but I'm assuming this is not a big deal.
Any opinions on the best way to get this done?
Have I totally ignored a better option?
Most of the tapes are Mini DV (recorded on a SONY TRV33 circa 2003), but there are also several video 8 cassettes and a few full size VHS cassettes. The problem is that I cannot do a direct transfer to my computer from the camcorder via USB.
Here are the alternatives that I have found regarding the Mini DV tapes:
1. Use a firewire (I Link) cable. Of course neither my laptop nor my desktop (both PCs) have a firewire port.
2. Use a video capture device like this from Elgato https://www.elgato.com/en/video/video-capture, or this Blackmagic https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/intensity. If I go this route will there be any loss of picture quality from transferring data with the composite signal?
3.Use my wife's laptop (also PC) which does have a firewire port, but it has very limited storage space so I would need to transfer one tape to her computer then transfer the file to my desktop and delete the file from her hard drive. There are a lot of tapes so it would mean she would not have access to her computer during these transfers. I'd prefer to avoid this.
4. Use my son's 3+ year old 13" Mac Book Pro. He really won't need his computer until he leaves for college in late August so this would be a convenient choice, but from the videos that I have seen on youtube, it appears that this would require some version of iMovie which is not on his computer. I can buy the app but I don't know if there is a compatibility issue with an older camera and a new version of iMovie. I've never done a file transfer from a mac to a PC but I'm assuming this is not a big deal.
Any opinions on the best way to get this done?
Have I totally ignored a better option?
