How to Capture Video into Your Computer?

So you know how a camcorder works…you also have heard about video editing software programs…but to be able to edit your videos you need to capture the recorded video – be it analog or digital - into your computer.

This is where you need a capturing device…and this is especially important if you want to capture analog video into your computer. So what is analog video?

Do you have an Analog camcorder? Do you have video stored on VHS Tapes (used to be quite common until a few years back)? These videos are stored in analog format. So if you want to capture the analog video from VHS tapes, you will need an A/D (analog-to-digital) conversion device to do the transfer to your computer. As the name suggests this device converts video from analog format to digital format.

Once you have the video in digital form on your computer, you can do any sort of processing/editing to it.

What if your video is already in digital format? Almost all the camcorders nowadays are digital and they already record the video in a digital format. If your video is already recorded in digital format, then your computer will need to have a Firewire card to be able to transfer the video to your computer.

You may have already heard of USB for transferring data, but if you have not heard of Firewire, just remember it gives you extremely fast transfer speeds, much faster than USB.

So just remember, if it is Digital video, you will need Firewire to capture it...if it is Analog video, you will need an analog-to-digital conversion device to capture it.