My sister and brother-in-law just arrived to Singapore to run some errands. They brought me our family Canon camcorder. I have been wanting it for a while now. I brought TONS of miniDV cassettes that was used to record our big family lives so far, be it our family travel, videos of my niece growing up, virtually every thing that my dad, my mom, my sis, my bro-in-law, and myself took over the years since we bought the Canon camcorder a couple of years back. I brought those cassettes when I went back from Chinese New Year holiday early this year together with another Sony camcorder that we have. This Sony camcorder is of newer model, provides driver for Windows when plugged into USB, so I thought this should do the job of converting those cassettes into MPG or WMV and eventually into DVDs. The goal is simple: convert all those miniDV cassettes into DVDs. The journey of converting them was much more challenging than I thought.
So, I brought back the Sony camcorder along with me back to Singapore. The first two cassettes were played and converted fine using WinAVI Video Capture (simply because Windows Vista Movie Maker could not recognize Sony camcorder that was plugged in). The next 47 cassettes, that was recorded using Canon camcorder, somehow when played in Sony camcorder, the video was jerky with visible boxy pattern on the side. Later I found out, the reverse is true, play cassettes that was recorded in Sony camcorder in Canon ones, the effect showed up as well. So, my home project of converting all those videos were stopped at that point. 
Now, I have the Canon camcorder, I found out that the USB port provided by the camcorder only connect the SD card that was in it, but not the video. Later, I found out that, for Canon camcorder, you must use its Firewire/IEEE1394 port for videos.
Okay, that was a very long introduction to the background of this post hehe… 
Since my home desktop didn’t have any Firewire port, I went to Simlim and buy a PCI-card add-on. It costs $19 for a PCI card that has three Firewire ports. I plugged in the Canon camcorder, Vista installed the necessary drivers (amazingly the camcorder was recognized) and this dialog popped up.
Windows Import Video
Windows Import Video? hmmm…. that’s new, I thought 
. Apparently it is part of Windows Movie Maker. I launched it, and I can tell you, this is one of the easiest application I have ever used to convert videos. Here are what you need to do and click to get those cassettes into digital format.
Select the name and where you want to save the file. Also, the file format. Only WMV and AVI are offered here. I chooses WMV for the obvious reason, size (2GB for WMV vs 12GB for AVI)
To convert the entire videotape, select the first option, click Next.
It’ll rewind the cassette to the beginning automatically, then start recording. It’ll stop recording when the cassettes has reached its end.
That’s my niece doing her usual stuffs, opening drawers and cupboard, and took out everything that’s in it, very cute. The time taken will exactly be the same as the length of your cassette. For mine, it is 60-mins cassette, so the recording took exactly 60 mins. Note that during this process, it is recommended NOT to do heavy task on your machine, or it’ll affect the resulting video, like dropped frames. It IS a processor-intensive process. My processor is peaked at 100% all the time for the whole capture and processing.
Processing time of 60 mins cassette took ~50 mins on my computer with Pentium 4 – 2.8GHz. It should be faster if you have the newer Core 2 Duo processors.
When it’s done, you have a WMV video, ready to be burned into DVD. It’s so easy it’s unbelievable. I never knew converting videos can be so easy. Now, I’m at my seventh cassettes out of 50 I have. For 60-mins cassettes, I need 60 minutes of capturing, ~50 minutes of processing time, and 2GB of hard drive space. At the current rate, I’ll probably need another three-four months to complete all these
.
