How Do I Edit Video From My Hi8 Camcorder

by Andrew Alexander

Published on Dec 18, 2001 12:00 AM
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In the seventh question in our twelve days of questions, this question comes up every once and a while. In an age where television commercials are now showing how easy it is to edit video on your computer, everyone with a camcorder actually believes it. However only newer digital camcorders are capable of this level of ease; anyone with a VHS, 8mm or Hi-8 camcorder will not have it as easy.

The major hurdle with footage from a non-DV camera is actually just getting it onto the computer. DV cameras (miniDV and Digital8) usually come equipped with a firewire port (a.k.a. i.Link, IEEE1394, digital video) which is the most stable and easy way of accomplishing this. Non-DV cameras must resort to one of two solutions to transferring the video onto computer.

1. DV pass-through solution. In this solution the non-DV camera is hooked up to a DV camera or other device which is able to translate the non-DV signal (“analog”) into a DV signal. From there it is either recorded onto the new device or able to be transferred directly to a computer. Of course, this requires you to buy, rent or borrow a DV camera with analog pass-through capability or any of a host of devices which accomplish the same function.

2. Analog video capture card. While most video cards these days come with “video out” capability, where what you see on the monitor can be connected and viewed on a television, some video cards are coming with “video in” capability. With this functionality the signal from any camcorder can be imported and digitized through the video card onto the computer. Companies like ATI, Matrox and Hauppage all make products which satisfy this requirement. The problem is that your system must be rock-solid and stable in order to digitize video at high resolution. If it is not solid, then any “burp” your computer makes will disrupt the video recording and you will drop frames. Entire websites have been devoted to how to increase the stability of your system to capture analog video.

Capturing analog video is much more flexible than a DV pass-through solution. With DV pass-through, your captured video must conform to the DV standard, or 29.97 frames per second at a 720x480 frame size, which equates to 3.6 megabytes per second. This can eat up disk space in a hurry. With analog capture, you can typically choose smaller resolutions and frame rates to conserve disk space, and increase the stability of the capture.