Video capture converter thingy.

Can one of you video masters please help me? I have a Panasonic mini dv camera that has firewire out and the 1/8" miniplug to red/yellow/white out. I want to transfer video from the camera to my laptop but I don't have firewire in or a slot to add a card. I found one of these on Amazon that should do the trick. The question is, is it even worth the price

http://www.amazon.com/EZgrabber2-Cap...=cm_cr_pr_pb_i


Is there a better option? I do have a desktop computer that I can add a firewire card to so maybe that is better? Any help is appreciated.

For $24 that isn't a bad deal, might as well try it out. A Firewire card would be a little bit more and worth it if you plan on upgrading cameras at anytime. Even though firewire is kinda going out the door for how fast usb is now a days....

Yeah, I didn't think the price was bad. Really all I want is to get video onto my laptop so I can send it to the family. I have a first gen flip that does that well, but the mini dv is a much better quality.

Thanks.

EZ cap sucks. Very poor bitrate constraints & saves in poor codecs. Plus you can find EZ-Cap's for $6.
You're going to loose a lot less quality using firewire & actually taking the information straight off the camera instead of trying to capture it using poor capture methods.

Once you get it on your camera, it is going to look terrible becuase it's interlaced. Before sending it out, or putting it on the internet you should deinterlace it. YADIF mode 1 in avisynth will do very well. Pass it through Staxrip using YADIF & convert it to h264 with AAC audio.

I'm assuming you have a PC laptop/desktop?

I have to agree to Toysrme.. Capturing via firewire is your best bet. You can pick up firewire card for $16 (shipped) from new egg (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...NG&PageSize=20)

If you capture over firewire the .avi file will be 13GB per hour of footage, so make sure you have the available diskspace before you start.

Which editing program are you using? Some will allow you to capture the footage.. some will even split it based on the date/time stamp... or you can pick up something like Scenalyzer (http://www.scenalyzer.com/main.html) which, btw hasn't be updated in years! In the rare case that I have to capture older DV footage I'll still use my copy of Scenalyzer over Premiere Pro CS4.

I use a card similar to this on my laptop and it's worked fine. You can find them for under $20.