HELP! Transferring Sony video 8 camcorder tapes to PC

[mkl]

Help! I have an 11 year old Sony Camcorder TR505E and I want to copy the tapes onto my PC so I can edit/put onto dvd. However, as it's old, it only has phono connections no USB!!! Any ideas on how I can achieve this?

[lenklatt]

the best method is to get a tv tuner card like winfast 2000xp.
it has inputs for RCA video RCA audio and S Video
ulead videostudio will reconize it

[RichardT]

I had this same dilemma. Connecting from the old camcorder to the PC using an analogue capture card and composite connections gave poor quality results (and some problems with sound which are suggested at in other posts). The same applied with copying from a VHS machine (of course - no different)

Perversly I found that by far the best results were obtained by using the composite video connections to copy onto my newer digital camcorder (you can use a line-in composite connection on my camcorder to record directly onto the mini-DV tape) and then, once recorded - capture onto the PC using firewire as usual.
This gave perfectly acceptable results for transferring veteran footage onto DVD for future storage.

Does this sound wierd??

[DVDDoug]

If you don't have access to a digital camcorder that can do the analog-to-digital conversion -

ATI makes the very popular ALL-In-Wonder capture cards.

Pinnacle makes capture cards and external capture devices that connect to your computer's USB-2 port.

Most internal cards include a TV tuner, so you can use your computer as a TiVo.

If you are planning on editing your videos, do not get an MPEG-only capture device. (There are lots of problems editing MPEGs, which is not meant to be an editable format.)