How to transfer video from Elura mini-DV recorder to digital

[monkman911]

Hi all,

I am getting ready to convert all of my mini-dv tapes to digital form.What would be the best way to do this and not lose any of the video quality? I will be using a Win10 machine that is fairly new. I would like to stay away from the composite video and s-video options and use the IEEE1394 port on the camera. I saw the 1394 to USB cords are available, would these work?

Thank you in advance!

[shadowsports · Accepted solution]

Greetings, 

If you have a desktop buying  a firewire card with cable kit on Amazon is preferred.  They are about $20.

The firewire to USB adapters are not as fast, but are also usable. 

Software is a different story.  ClipChamp which replaced windows movie maker no longer supports firewire capture.  I think WinDV still captures from firewire.  It's old however.

Another option is an online service where you send your tapes in and they come back on DVD.  This can be a huge time saver depending on the number of tapes you have.

[monkman911]

Thank you for the reply! I'll be using Nero for capturing so I need to check to see if it supports firewire. I'm not looking to have the video on DVD's, just digitized so after the tapes have deteriorated I'll still have the video. Most of the tapes are almost 20 years old so I think it's time to back them up. 😊

Thank you again!

[normadel]

If you can get hold of a Windows XP machine that has Firewire, XP came with Windows Movie Maker....a Firewire-transfer and editing program.  WMM was also available in a package called "Windows Essentials 2012", from Microsoft, for Windows 7 and later. If you can find someone (like me) who saved the program, it makes the process easy. Built-in Firewire is best, but a desktop with a Firewire adapter card should do. Firewire-to-USB is not guaranteed to work. I wouldn't recommend it.

[monkman911]

Thank you for the info! A computer with XP is not an option unfortunately so based on shadowsports recommendation I did order a firewire card from the jungle website. It should be here today and I'll let you know how things go.

Cheers!

[monkman911]

SInce I'm new at this, I do have a question about image quality. Will the firewire's image be better than S-video? Or is it just about throughput to the computer?

Thanks again for all of the help!

[normadel]

Can't answer that question, but it's moot. You have to transfer to computer via Firewire.