I want to transfer VHS-C to DVD. I have my old camcorder which is still working. I have a 17" iMac with 10.2.8 with iMovie and iDVD but I've had trouble learning them in limited tries. How hard is it if i really try? What kind of equipment/cables do I need?
You've had some suggestions from the list already, and I thought I'd add my 2 cents. I wanted to convert my 200+ tape library of VHS to DV before they degraded, and looked into things. Tried some stuff out.
There are two big issues, to be considered separately: Input and Output.
Regarding Output. Be clear on whether you ultimately want a DVD (MPEG-2 format, on a DVD disc) or a VCD (Video CD format, on a standard CD disc--playable on some DVD players), or can get by with just a QuickTime video, to view on your computer. If you can get by with QT, then iMovie is all you need for the output, and you can even burn the QT file to a CD for storage. Be aware that broadcast TV is of higher resolution than VHS, and VCD format is slightly lower in resolution than VHS. But if your VHS tapes are old or degraded, then VCD may be all the quality you need. If you go ahead and make DVDs, your pixel resolution may be higher, but the quality of the picture will be only as good as your original VHS anyway. For either DVD or VCD, you will NEED the full version of Roxio's Toast, in order to burn the format on your DVD or CD burner. iMovie alone is not enough.
Regarding Input. You will need an analog-to-digital converter, such as the Dazzle Hollywood Bridge product, the ElGato EyeTV product, or the EskapeLabs MyTV product. The Dazzle product is a favorite among PC users, but my experience was absolutely HORRIBLE with it, and I would not recommend it--no end of sound/synch and frame-lock issues. I have used the EskapeLabs product with success, and it comes with a licensed version of Strata Videoshop, an excellent program as an alternative to iMovie. I saw the first ElGato product in action at Macworld 2002 and was very impressed, and can only assume that their newer products are even better. The Dazzle product is a firewire converter, that converts your analog signal to digital video, and sends it to the Mac via Firewire, as a DV signal, for iMovie to capture. The other two are USB products, and work fine because they do the conversion and some compression at a hardware level before running the signal through the slow USB bus. Audio is handled separately from the video data, and is captured from the Mac's microphone port. The EskapeLabs product also comes with all the necessary cables. I don't know about the ElGato products.
Thirdly, realize that encoding digital video is very time consuming--taking upwards of 20 minutes per minute of video footage, on a 500MHz G3 Mac. And it's a bit of an art, there being many different sorts of compression schemes available for both video and audio. It easily gets confusing. Once you figure out what suits you, however, it's not bad, if you have the time. In the end, I indefinitely postponed my project, deciding to await faster hardware for this encoding process, and potentially better Analog-DV conversion products. It may well be that the newest G5 Macs are fast enough to offer essentially real-time encoding. I don't know. I am too poor right now to even think about it.
Finally, you might consider a product that automates this whole process for you... the Terapin video CD recorder. This product is a stand-alone component that you connect to your VCR (or tv) using standard RCA-style AV jacks for video and audio. You put blank CD's into the Terapin. Press play on the VCR and press start on the Terapin. It records the incoming analog signal in REAL-TIME to create a Video CD (VCD), using its own hardware-level compression. Easy to use; probably sufficient quality for your job. And costs around $250 on major auction sites. The finished VCD is playable on most DVD players and most computers. [Compare that to $100 for Toast, plus $200 for an analog-DV converter, plus hours and hours of your own time optimizing the process, plus 20 hours of computer time doing the encoding for every hour of video.]
Good luck.
--Jim.
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