I’d been thinking about it for a while and finally decided to take the plunge. I wanted to get my old home movies that I shot on my Panasonic miniDV camcorder transferred onto my computer. From there I planned to stitch them together into a set of fun videos for the kids and adults to enjoy. Basic home video production.
I have a collection of about 18 miniDV tapes - of which 14 were labeled. The last time I tried to play video on my old camcorder (about 5 or 6 years ago) it looked so bad I was worried the camcorder was damaging the tapes. So I put it all away. Well, recently I decided to bite the bullet and get it back out. I found a service (LegacyBox) that would capture all of my tapes to digital for me. It was a bit pricey but I decided it was worth it. They didn’t have a 14 tape option but they let you add tapes to existing orders so I ordered the 10 tape kit and planned to add the 4 tapes. Be warned: They have quite a few extra fees so the price got higher than I anticipated but I went ahead and made the order. Here’s how it works:
LegacyBox sends you a box to pack up your tapes and send it to them. They also send you labels for each tape you’ll know what was captured. They send you extra labels as well so you can add tapes. The cost was $17.99 per extra tape. Then you pack up the tapes and send them in. They capture them to whatever device you choose (flash drive, on line, CDs, etc.) and send them back. It’s a pretty slick service.
So, my box came and I started packing it up. In the process, I found that one of my tapes was damaged and one only had 7 minutes of footage. Then there was the unlabeled tapes. Blank? Not blank? The LegacyBox FAQ says if a tape is blank they’ll give you a free tape on your next order. If a tape is damaged, they give you a free tape on your next order. Honestly, I didn’t want to do another order but I didn’t know what I had. What do I do?
I decided to pull out my old camcorder and try again. This time it worked great! I was able to determine what was on the unlabeled tapes and found that 2 tapes had footage that I’d already turned into a movie. I didn’t need to transcribe them. Well shoot - maybe I could import the 7 minute tape and save myself close to $20. Oh wait, there’s a problem. I need FireWire to capture the video to my computer and my computer doesn’t doesn’t support that. What now?
First I tried getting a $10 FireWire to USB cable. I thought I was so clever. Yeah, it turns out it doesn’t work that way. FireWire and USB are not compatible. That didn’t work.
I decided to try something else - I bought a FireWire card for $20 from Amazon. Maybe that would work. As an aside, I used to have a FireWire capture card but I threw it away a few years ago because, “when am I ever going to use that?!” Oh. Anyways, a couple days later, the card came. I installed it in my computer and hooked it up to my camcorder. Nothing. It didn’t see to work at all. That’s ok, I can fix this.
To the internet!
After looking around and trying out all the advice I could fine - things like putting in older drivers (not sure they really installed) for the capture card as well as enabling the administrator user and running things from there, still nothing. Then, I was in device manager looking at my devices when I noticed my camcorder was listed. That’s odd. So I tried the old, “unplug it and plug it back in” trick. That’s when I heard the new device sound from Windows. Did it work?
I pulled up WinDV and BAM! There it was. Yay!!
Now I was able to capture video to my computer. WinDVD is old and unsupported but it’s a free download and it worked great. It was very nice to automatically break up the video into clips every time the time stamp jumps. So instead of having an hour long clip for each tape, I have a bunch of small clips that I can stitch together. That will be much easier to deal with!
So, I’d already paid for a bunch of tapes to be transcoded so I’ll send those in but I was able to keep it down to 11 so I’m not out as much money and I can get started right away.
So, what are the best tools (hardware and software) for home video production. That will be in part 2.
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