Importing video to computer

[Jedisk8]

Hi was wondering about importing video from a video camera can it be done through usb or do u have to have a video caputre card.Also how can i hook up my vcr to my computer.I have a gforce 2mx with tv out.
Thanks
Jedisk8

------------------
aka: Trax

[Huge]

You may want to try a 3rd party such as Dazzle or another company similar to them. I have an old parallel port version that I bought years ago and it worked pretty well. They now have usb and firewire versions of their products. There are better products out there but for the money, it really isn't bad.

[daylef]

Jedisk8
The question is bigger than Ben Hur but to simplify. If you have an analogue camcorder you are limited to some sort of capture card. You will probably want to compress the data and you may want to chose MPEG1 for lower quality images or MPEG2 for better quality (I'll leave MPEG4 out for now). In your cature card selection you can opt to buy a basic TV card which does nothing other than provide holes to plug your camcorder into. The rest is done but software.
The next step is hardware compression and some cards provide MPEG1 encoding but at a slightly higher price. At the top end is hardware MPEG2 encoding but expect to pay bigger bucks for it. In fact pro versions can set you back a few thousand.
At the top of the tree in terms of quality imaging is iLink (Firewire) but that's reserved for digital camcorders. Fortunately for us the cost of these has dropped heaps in the last year. However what is emerging are combo cards which are iLink with hardware MPEG2 encoding and composite audio and video connections (analogue devices, VCRs and camcorders).
Finaly MPEG4 or DiVX is becoming the prefered option for PC buffs and at this time there are no hardware cards. It provides near DVD quality at a fraction of the space (an hour of video will fit on a CDR). The down side is it's only playable on a PC and not a standalone DVD player.

Hope that helps
Cheers...