Any capture card, PCI or AGP.... Matrox, ATI, Pinnacle whatever, that can
convert analog to digital will do this. But if you want great quality with
ease of use, and  a minimum of problems, then get an external analog to
video bridge that plugs into a Firewire port, .....like a Dazzle Bridge
http://www.dazzle.com/products/hw_bridge.html. ..around $250 U.S.

This will record at  very high quality, at rate of around 14 GB per hour.
Then use a video editor of your choice, if you wish to edit. A free one is
Video DUB and you can use the free version  of TMPGenc to encode to VCD or
SVCD for viewing on a regular DVD player. Or there are many editing
programs, with encoders, that can be used to edit and  create VCD, SVCD,
and DVD.

Understand that when working with video there is no <too fast>. Video is
the black hole of upgrades.
When capturing or editing video, the two most important factors, by a wide
margin, are processor speed, and hard drive speed. It is a number crunching
job. If money is indeed not an issue, then you want a 3 Ghz P4 running XP,
so you can take advantage of hyperthreading.  You could go all out and have
a dual 2.5 Ghz Xenon setup.

You probably also want  a single  15K  SCSI Cheetah for your OS with  three
more15K RPM 72 GB Seagate SCSI Cheetahs, in a hardware RAID setup for
capture and editing.

You can use any large 72000 RPM Ultra 100 drives for storage and playback.
You will want at least 500 megs of RAM and  a decent video and sound card.
And if this is hooked up to a single user network, he might want to upgrade
his network to Gigabit speeds as he will no doubt be transferring a number
of huge files across the network. Every time I move 8 to 10 GB of files I
start thinking maybe it is time to upgrade my network.

You could also use a professional series  Matrox RT.X100  Video editor
capture card instead of a bridge...but they sell for around $1000 plus US,
and are software based...so you need serious horsepower to use them.

  You can do the same job with IDE drives and a PIII, any AMD or even a
Celeron,  but if you want to make it easy and get the best quality then go
with a fast P4 and an external bridge.

However, if he just wants to turn unedited VHS tapes into DVDs ...Phillips
is advertising a stand alone product, much like a combo VHS DVD player that
does exactly this.

Rode
The NOSPIN Group
http://freepctech.com


>He's asked me to find out what software and hardware he needs to enable him
>to edit and save to HDD, around 20 years worth of home video.
>
>I'm assuming that this is footage that he's shot with older video cameras,
>and subsequently committed to VCR tape. He'll also be adding new material
>from time to time, and this will come from his new digital video camera.
>
>Eventually he plans to burn the material to DVD, but doesn't want to commit
>to this system until the DVD standard has settled down, so for the time
>being he'll save it to a large HDD.
>
>Cost won't be a factor so much as quality and ease of use.  In fact he's
>intimated that he might consider a new computer altogether when I tell him
>what he needs.
>
>Ian Porter

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