Please reccommend way to capture from older camcorder

[screwball2]

I have no problems at all capturing video from my sony digital camera, but I have been trying for months to capture video from an older Sharp vl-a10 camcorder. There is so much invaluable stuff recorded when my kids were younger, holidays etc. but nomatter what I try I am having no success. I bought a 'Dazzle' gizmo that comes with a trial version of Pinnacle (which I do not want) and have no success at all. I have tried another gizmo called 'Easycap' that comes with a very early version of ulead and does capture a little but drops 20% of frames but records speech that very rapidly becomes miles out-of-sinc due to the dropped frames. There must be a simple way? I am fed up with keep spending money on attachments that don't work. Please any suggestions, there must be many out there that do this all the time.

[skier-hughes]

Canopus advc range of digital convertors.
Analogue in digital out via firewire, use whichever app you want to.
Super quality, very easy to use, but not in the sme price bracket as your other purchases.

[Ron P.]

What model of Sony Digital camera? It is very possible that it has what's called Pass-Through Analog to Digital conversion. I use my Sony TRV-120 for this very purpose.

You should have a cable that has RCA composite plugs on one end, and a single small male plug on the the other end, that plugs into your digital camcorder.

Your Sharp camcorder probably has RCA composite output jacks. You plug the RCA composite ends of the cable mentioned above into your Sharp camcorder, and of course the other end into your digital camcorder. Your Digital camcorder should also have a firewire port, which you use to connect to your PC.

Turn on both camcorders, and then launch VS, go to the capture step. You would choose DV as the capture format, because your Sony camcorder is converting the analog signal to digital. The difference is that you can not control the Sharp camcorder via VS. You need to push play on your Sharp camcorder to start recording.

I also have an old analog Sharp, and this does work...

[skier-hughes]

Good call Ron, should have picked that one up myself

[Devil]

Tutorial at http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=29031

[rguthrie]

screwball2,

I'd also add WinDV to my toolbox. It's a very small (and free!) program that just captures video, and it does it very, very well. I've used it in the past when I had problems with losing frames from other programs that I think can suffer from memory bloat. Let's face it, capturing video is a computationally expensive process, especially if your recording from an analog tape because now your computer is making MPEG or AVI video on the fly.

Hope this helps,
Ron Guthrie

[Ken Berry]

WinDV of course will only capture in DV format from firewire so it is not useful for any other type of capture. But I use it all the time for my DV captures and it does a great job.

As for the Dazzle device, Pinnacle makes them so that they will only work with their own software (i.e. Pinnacle Studio). One thing you could try with it is to install the Pinnacle software and capture with that. Then open the captured files in Video Studio for editing...

[thad]

WinDV of course will only capture in DV format from firewire so it is not useful for any other type of capture.

It's my understanding that it's a transfer, not a capture.

Thad

[Ken Berry]

You are of course quite correct. However, I was using the term generically, the way most users do -- just as they talk of 'capturing' from hard disk cameras, mini DVD cameras and high def AVCHD cameras and SD mpeg-4 cameras that use SD cards. In strict parlance, you don't capture from any of these either -- you either import or transfer from... But most people seem to know what is meant when you say 'capture'...

[screwball2]

All replies have been a help, I now have several avenues to try. Especially from Vidoman. Thankyou once again.