"misterroy" wrote in message
...

what a prat I have been

We all have days like that ;o)


the camera in question does use a tape, so the video can be digitally
edited on pc.
The camera at work does indeed have an output, but it is analogue...

If it is MiniDV or Digital8, it will have a firewire output. For less than
£15 you can equip the PC with a firewire card and the cable to connect it to
the camera. If you're on Windows, you can get Windows Movie Maker for
editing for free. The port you need will be labelled iLink, IEEE1394 or
Firewire. The computer end will probably have the bigger socket so make sure
your cable has the right plugs.

Some PCs and laptops have firewire ports preinstalled. Have a look around
the PCs at your disposal to check this before buying a card and opening up a
PC.

":Jerry:" wrote in message
...

No, it won't go down a generation, that old chestnut was due to copying to
another analogue recording (the generation was the analogue recording
process), so as long as a decent analogue capture card or analogue to
digital converter is used the quality should not suffer - it will stay at
the same quality as the play-out.

There is, though, the caveat that there may be some loss due to lossy codec
compression. For example, a good-quality analogue master sent down S Video
can suffer noticeably from being compressed to DV en route from card to HDD.

Another forum I am on seems to live by the "DV is god among codecs" mantra.
It's really infuriating to see DV's use recommended as a means to sidestep
encoding problems instead of actually identifying and fixing the problem and
avoiding the quality drop.