Help with capturing video from old Sony Handycam

[Dart8181]

I could use some simple instructions to connect my Sony Digital Handycam- Digital 8- DCR-TRV103/TRV110 1998. Right now I ham connecting the camcorder to a ION Video 2 PC MKII with an RCA cable. The IONVideo 2 PC MKII is then attached to my HP laptop with a USB cable. My software is Corel VideoStudio 2018 Ultimate. When I try to capture it shows in the source window the ION drive. The format only shows DVD as a choice. When I hit play nothing shows up in the Capture window. I am stuck and need some help. I am not trying to do anything fancy I would just like to transfer some old tape to my computer.

Thank you for your help

[lata]

Hi
and welcome to the forums

Try selecting the Options and Video Properties
Input source may need to be Composite, if that option is available
TV System for me always defaults to NTSC when I need Pal

Try different settings

Profile tab
The best will be 720 x 576 for Pal or 720 x 480 for NTSC ( I think)
16:9 or 4:3 depending on your recording

Capture files will be Mpeg2
Do a short capture to check quality, if you get jagged lines then check settings for interlacing, I think should be Upper Field.

[Ken Berry]

Interesting. Your camcorder is a bit of a treasure since it was the first model Digital 8 produced by Sony. It could play analogue 8mm and Hi8 tapes, as well as digital ones, and so could be used to stream analogue video to your computer to be digitized. But it did this via its Firewire port rather than via RCA cable. I think the latter would only give low quality streaming-type video at best, and that would be in mpeg-2 as you are finding.

The problem of course is that the camcorder's main format is DV/AVI which was quite a good format in its day -- probably the best consumer-level one at the time. And to get that you need a firewire connection and cable (Sony called it i-Link.) No recent computers as far as I am aware have these any more. (I keep an old Firewire-capable computer operating for this reason alone.) But I think you can still buy Firewire adapters and cables from specialty video shops. It's worth trying to find anyway.

And VS still allows DV/AVI capturing. It is captured in real time, however, so a 1 hour tape will take 1 hour to capture. But the quality of the captured video is exactly the same as on the tape. It is also large at around 13 GB for one hour of video. And importantly, when editing or rendering, that you keep DV/AVI's Lower Field First which is the opposite of most mpeg-4 video these days which is Upper Field First (or Frame Based/progressive).