I have taken quite a bit of footage with my digital camcorder over the years. I have all of my mini-DV tapes laying around in my home office from all of the home videos that I have taken. I have only ever looked at them when I get the energy to hook the camcorder up to the TV which lately has been very rare. However, with the recent purchase of a media center PC that I hooked into the TV in the family room, it seemed as if it was right time to transfer the videos to my computer so that my family could watch them very easily on the TV.

I really had no idea where to start, but upon examining the camera, I found a DV in/out plug that seemed like a good place to begin. I tracked down the box that the camcorder came in and luckily the cable that matched the connection on the camera (a firewire cable) was still in the box. I plugged one end into the camcorder (see picture) and the other end into my PC running Windows XP which luckily had a firewire connection. Lo and behold, the PC recognized the device as a Sony Camcorder and asked if I wanted to launch Windows Movie Maker v1.1. Since I had not purchased any other software for video editing yet, I decided to give Windows Movie Maker a try.

I quickly discovered that it was fairly easy to convert the video into a media file that I could play on the computer. However, I also discovered that it could take up a lot of space on my hard drive depending upon the video quality setting

that I used. I wanted the best quality that I could without taking upon an enormous amount of space. So I took 10-second samplings of the same video segment on several different quality settings and compared the results. Figuring I had about 10 hours of tape that I wanted to digitize, I settled on a setting that gave me the best quality without eating all of my hard drive space. That turned out to be 768Kbps, which amounted to about 5MB per minute of video.

As I was sampling the video, I also noticed that the format that it produced was a Microsoft Windows media format (wmv). Since I was only planning in the near term of putting them on my Windows Media Center PC, I did not have an issue with this (especially since I didn't have to buy software).

Finally, it came time for the long and tedious portion of the exercise, performing the actual digitizing. I found an idle PC and started the process. It was as simple as pressing the record button on the software after all the settings were set where I wanted them. An hour later, I was presented with a bunch of clips that I could play from my computer (by selecting the "Automatically Create Clips" checkbox in the Option menu). I repeated this step with all of my tapes and now have digital copies of all my tapes.

After I copied them to my media center PC, I can now access all of my home videos from the TV in my family room very easily. We now watch old home videos at least a few times a month, and it is such a pleasure.