HELP Camcorder editing advice

Oh dear I am in a bit of a mess can someone give me advice.

I have a Sony camcorder model DCR HC24E which I purchased some years ago 2006 before our RTW trip and for our future traveling now we are in retirement.
The images are on a mini tape and I keep buying them each time we travel so all the tapes are stored almost 100 of them now and I seriously need to get them edited and copied onto DVD.

In my naivety my original intention was to copy the tapes onto the computer edit them and copy to DVD I honestly thought this could be done.

My son bought me the software Directors Chair and said just look at help to get started but I didn't understand the photography terms and put this to one side to deal with at later date.

Over the years I've tried to get on a course to learn how to do video editing and I think at one time I also left a message on this site, even tried the software suggested but didn't understand what I was doing and was afraid I would loose my recordings.

You know how it is putting things off, anyhow this week I thought right at least I can make a start by copying all the tapes onto my external hard drive.

I rang our local Sony centre and asked if they had a cable which would attach the camcorder to the computer I assumed by a USB port. He said it wasn't possible to do this, (which I find hard to believe) and that the only way of editing is to buy a DVD recorder copy from the camera onto a writable DVD, then edit via my computer and copy onto another DVD.
I am not a techi person and my husband as no interest in photography at all and I don't know anyone who can give me advice so I'm asking the question can this possibly be correct.
Thanks I'd really appreciate your advice.
Jean

That doesn't sound right at all.
It's been a long time since I've done anything with video/editing but from memory (and a little help from Google)....

You will want a firewire cable to transfer the footage.
It looks like Sony have some proprietary connection called i.link, so it'll be something similar to this: cable.

From there, you'll need a nice user friendly video capture/editing software. I'll leave it up to someone else to recommend this as I've only worked with Final Cut which is far beyond what's required for this sort of job but I've seen people online recommending one called Pinnacle?

I only skimmed it but this article seems to explain the process quite nicely (and if not, try searching on google, there are bound to be a thousand youtube tutorials on this sort of thing!)

Be aware that viedo footage will take up huge amounts of space on your computer so you may want to save the footage onto an enternal harddrive so your machine doesn't get all bogged down.

Good luck!!

Hi Lucky

Thank you so much for your advice I didn't understand the article but I've e-mailed my son to look it over and he'll explain it to me in non techi language, I don't have XP so he will probably sort that out for me as well.
I need to be sure about the connections to my computer from the camera so will double check this but I so hope this will work. Can't understand why Sony said I couldn't do it, strange.

thanks again much appreciated

Jean

Well, you certainly have your work cut out for you.

I may be able to help, I work in video production and we use Adobe Premier these days. It is very versatile, and will easily be able to capture from the tape. The full suite is very expensive, but Premiere Elements should be fine and affordable and do what you need.

I do agree, it is probably firewire that you would need. Likely a 1394 to 400 cable would do it. Do you have a fire wire connection on your computer? If not, you would need a hard drive to go through. Well, you should have a HD anyway to capture your video onto. Get at least 500GB external as you do have 100 hours to save. Make sure the hard drive has all the connections you need.
Also, not sure how old your PC is, but use the fastest connection you have available going PC to HD. eSata is best. Otherwise Firewire then USB.

So in the end, you should have the camera with a tape in it, connected via firewire going into the hard drive, which is then daisy chained to your computer. On the PC, open adobe premiere elements and get to capturing.

Is this your camera? It says you have i.Link so that is what you use to get to the computer.

Wish I could just do it for you. I have the stup here. Let me know if that helps.

And for our next lesson we will talk about the editing process... just kidding. Let me know how that goes for you.

I've been trying to sort things out over the last few days. The camera you link to is my camcorder.

Can you believe I have a firewire cable, my son bought it when I purchased my laptop in 2008 he must have realised I needed it for saving my tapes.
I also bought an external hard drive of 500 GB at the same time.
The software he bought me I couldn't open. Don't know why but I found windows movie marker which I understand came with windows vista which I have on this computer.
I've connected the cable and opened the software and managed to save one tape onto the external hard drive, I'd already used up 200 GB with the information from my laptop and the tape is using 12 GB for one tape so that's a problem.
I spoke to my son and he said I need to save in a compressed format which I have no idea how to do.
I opened up movie maker and it saved the tape in clips, there a timeline which you can drag the clips too and I am playing around. I need to take bits out I think it's called trimming so I'll have a go at this if I can work out what you do. I've printed off some help sheets so fingers crossed.
Why oh why aren't there any courses for people like me I really don't know there must be lots of people like myself who need help.
I'm going to keep at it I have no choice.
Thanks so much for your interest I really appreciate your comments.

I feel your pain.

But yes there are courses in this... I think. I went to university for video production, so I've done the courses and I use this gear all the time at work. As for a consumer video editing course, I would think they are out there. Not sure where to look for them though...

As for the space, yes it will eat it up. This is what I found online, and it's pretty spot on for your situation.

Standard def NTSC DV, with embedded 48k/16 bit stereo audio runs approximately 3.61 MB/second. So an hour (3.61 MB x 360 seconds) equals 12.996 GB.

As for converting it, you do have very limited options when using movie maker, I dont know how many different kinds of files you can capture as... If you have a big enough hard drive, why not just capture as it is, than edit the movies to what you want, then burn that onto DVD. Store the HD for future use and buy another. Or convert the final videos to a smaller file size. You also need an encoder and to know what kind of file you want, plus know how your going to view it, etc... Lots of annoying details for making what should be a simple video.

Additionally, you are probably capturing the whole tape, when you could selectively capture only what you know you are going to use. I dont know if Movie Maker has a "Batch Capture" function, but other programs do and that would save you space.

I would also suggest going to a forum specifically for the software you are using. Movie maker, right? Try this one out.

The folks there will be of more specific help for your particular issue. Again, wish I could just do it for you, but at least this is a valuable learning experience.

At the end of the day, just capture everything onto a hard drive to get that part of the project done. After you have everything digitized you could then start the editing. After you have everything edited work on burning it to DVD, although by that time DVD's will have gone the way of 8-tracks and replaced at least twice over. I love technology!

Hope this helps and that I didn't make this any more confusing. Let me know how you go. I'm cheering for you!