Transfer DV video tape to PC

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wyattspoppa

wyattspoppa

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Hey Ya'll,
I have a Sony Handycam and hundreds of hours of tape to transfer to my PC to save my home movies. Here's the issue; You can only do this with a rarely seen HDMI cable, and only on XP, the camera can not be recognized by a Vista/Win 7 or 8. The only cables that can do the transfer are AV cables or the oddly shaped HDMI I described. I don't know a single PC that has AV inputs, so that's useless. The only PC I own that has the matching HDMI input is my old XP, my Vista and Win 7 PC's don't have this HDMI port. My question is can I remove the video cartridge/card with the various HDMI and USB ports and install it in my Win 7 desktop? I do have an empty slot designed for another CD/DVD drive. I could just get the XP running again I suppose, but the fan is running full speed as soon as I power up, and anyway, I'd have to transfer the vids twice this way. The included software is Sony Imagemixer and the camera is a Sony HDR-HC3, a hi-def with mini DV tapes.
 
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IrnMan
The HDMI port is fairly common, essentially every graphics card and laptop for the past 5 years or more comes with one as standard. The issue here is that computers use HDMI out ports, not HDMI in. So if you plugged the camcorder into the laptop via a HDMI port, you wouldn't be able to do anything with it. Basically, you are looking down the wrong road with the HDMI port!

What you can do, as I have done myself to get some old home video footage from video tapes to PC, is use a video capture card (Video/Audio grabber). You can get them relatively cheap and basically the card has AV input and USB output. You plug the capture card into your PC via the USB and the camcorder into the capture card via the AV cables. (You'll need to install...
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IrnMan

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The HDMI port is fairly common, essentially every graphics card and laptop for the past 5 years or more comes with one as standard. The issue here is that computers use HDMI out ports, not HDMI in. So if you plugged the camcorder into the laptop via a HDMI port, you wouldn't be able to do anything with it. Basically, you are looking down the wrong road with the HDMI port!

What you can do, as I have done myself to get some old home video footage from video tapes to PC, is use a video capture card (Video/Audio grabber). You can get them relatively cheap and basically the card has AV input and USB output. You plug the capture card into your PC via the USB and the camcorder into the capture card via the AV cables. (You'll need to install the software/drivers associated with the capture card on the PC for it to be recognised). Then all you need to do is hit play on the camcorders playback button and it should start playing in the software on your PC, the software for the capture card will allow you to then record what is going through the capture card and save it as a video file on your desktop.

Here is an example capture card. You may want to do some more research into them before you buy one.
 
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Alabalcho

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@Wyattspoppa, are you sure this is HDMI cable, and not (more common for Sony) i400/i800 interface (otherwise known as FireWire)? This would be the best way to transfer your videos, and will preserve the full quality of the recording.

In that case, you would need a FireWire interface on your computer. Many older notebooks have this integrated, so you might be better off getting an used $150 laptop off eBay with that interface (and it will come with XP alreay preinstalled).
 
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wyattspoppa

wyattspoppa

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wyattspoppa

wyattspoppa

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I like where you're going with this, but just a few things...If I go AV cables, I will lose the high def quality. Composite can't transfer video in high def, I domn't even think it will be in 720 or 1080i. The HDMI I'm describing isn't the standard shape you're thinking of, this is more like a 4 pin firewire and not found on many PCs or laptops, I've bought 3 PC's since the XP days and none had this input, everything is now just standard HDMI and USB with a couple of memory stick ports for photo cards. So question is, if i buy a capture card for my Win 7 desktop, will it "handle" this odd 4 pin HDMI. If you look on the web, look up Sony Firewire and go to Pictures and you'll see the one I have to match...Thanks for helping me
 
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wyattspoppa

wyattspoppa

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You know what you're talking about, yes it's the Sony Firewire cable 4 pin to 6 or 9 pin I'll need. I'm on disabilty (permanent) so I'm trying to do this on a budget , so buying another PC is out. I already have an XP desktop with the exact firewire port I need, but the fan is running on high the second I turn it on and it never slows down, if i can solve that issue, we're golden. I can use that desktop and problem solved. Thanks for helping me.

 
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IrnMan

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Just had a look into this, whilst you will lose some quality with AV you may have difficulty getting a hold of the card required to capture via the Firewire Port. Firstly take a look at this link here, if you scroll down through this forum you will see a guy has posted screenshots of the captures using the different cable types (AV, S-Video, Firewire) just so you can gauge the difference and see if its worth the hassle. As for the card you may require the DV iLink Sony IEEE1394, it plugs into a PCI port in your PC. Although a quick look on Amazon and eBay shows it may be quite difficult to get hold of. Here's the link so you know what to look for.
 
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wyattspoppa

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Problem solved, I got an old Gateway XP desktop running and it had the 4 pin port, it instantly recognized the camera and capture was going, Thanks so much! The drag now is the size of DV tape time on a PC is like 10 MB for a few seconds of tape, a 60 minute tape will likely be like 6 gigs! Thanks so much guys
 
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wyattspoppa

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You were right, the special firewire fixed everything, I repaired my old XP desktop which had the weird shaped hdmi port and it recognized my handycam right away. You saved me having to buy a $250 dvi tape deck. I have a question, do you think I can remove the usb/hdmi port from my xp and install it in an open slot on my Win 7 desktop? First, it will be much faster at ripping the tapes than an xp and of course, I won't have to switch PC's each time I want to work with my home movies...
 
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wyattspoppa

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Oooh, I like your idea! I fixed the XP as you suggested, it was just a heatsink repair and my camcorder was recognized immediately but I began to rip the tape to files and the mb usage was huge. Are you suggesting I rip them to like a 1 TB hard drive or an external DVD burner?
 
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IrnMan

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Let me start with a quick explanation of why the video files are so large (in case you are interested). When you are ripping the videos from the camcorder you are basically taking the raw footage and storing it straight onto your PC, so the file size is 1:1 from camcorder to PC. I'm going to assume your camcorder records in HD at 1024*720 resolution (just so you get the gist of things). This means that every frame is made up of 1024*720 pixels, and each pixel requires roughly 1 byte of storage (hexadecimal RGB values plus an alpha, so: rrggbbaa = 8 bits/1 byte). So each frame is around 737280 bytes (0.74 mb) and I'd assume it'd record at around 24 fps which means that every second worth of video requires roughly 17.7mb. (All these numbers assume the camcorder does no compression on the raw footage itself).

So this leaves you with two options. Either as you mentioned, purchase an external hard drive to store all of the raw, uncompressed, footage (this option gives the best quality video, at the cost of much larger file sizes). The second option would be to get some free software and compress the footage yourself, the videos will lose some quality with this but the file sizes can drop quite significantly depending on the amount of compression you do.
 
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wyattspoppa

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No, I love the tech talk, and I'll definitely want to use compression, I'm not going to load up a 1 TB HDD with nothing but raw tape that I don't need in perfect Hi Def, it's family movies, not "Fifth Element". Even on my 60" 3DHD Sammy, I don't notice any quality loss worth mentioning when watching 720P/1080i etc, I am particular about my home theater images, but not the video of my son shoving spaghetti in his face (-;/. So shall I just rip it to the XP desktop and then use compression software to shrink it and burn discs or do you think I can steal the video card from the XP and patch it into my faster Win 7 somehow? (open bay)..how would you do this job? I'm transposing at least 25 60-90 min tapes..I plan to keep the backup files on my main PC's external HDD and burn the whole collection to DVD-R (Verbatims). It's amazing that you know all the formulas! Thanks for everything..

 
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Alabalcho

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Unfortunately, there is a good chance your old card won't have drivers for Windows 7 (but nothing should stop you trying).

You can also make a network between the two computers, directing the old XP (the grabber) to store the files over the network to the second PC (and to its external drive). This way you can do the processing of MovieN while Movie(N+1) is being captured.

But - if you go with network setup, check that your network won't be saturated by the grabber' output.
 
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IrnMan

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You could take the FireWire card out of the XP and put it in your Win7 PC, most of these cards use a standard PCIe slot so physically moving it from one PC to the other shouldn't be much of an issue. However, as mentioned, you may come across some driver issues. I think ripping it from the camcorder is fine on the XP computer (the Win7 PC won't be able to do this part any faster), however it'll likely struggle when compressing large video files so this is probably best done on the better Win7 PC. A simple way of doing it would be to just put the video onto the external drive after its been ripped on the XP machine and then transfer it to the Win7 PC to compress and burn to disc.
 
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wyattspoppa

wyattspoppa

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Pure Genius! Thank you

 
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