2.3 Computer with Firewire card

Most Windows desktop PC’s now come with Firewire/IEEE 1394. However if you have a PC that is more than a year old then there’s a chance that your PC does not come with a Firewire port. If that is the case then you will need to go get yourself a Firewire PCI card. There are a number of Firewire cards out so you’ll have plenty of choices to choose from. One thing to consider is getting a dual USB 2.0 and Firewire PCI card. Why? If your PC doesn’t have Firewire, then it’s a good bet that you only have USB 1.1. Why not take the opportunity to upgrade on both fronts. You can get something like the Adaptec DuoConnect card that comes with both types of ports. I personally use an Adaptec Firewire card that comes with three ports. Another reason to get firewire? If you plan on getting a digital camcorder then you’ll definitely need a firewire port or two in the future.

Firewire ports in the rear of the PC

You’ll also need to make sure that your system has a DVD burner if you’re planning to do what I will be doing. If you don’t want to make DVDs, you can always turn your VHS tapes into VCDs and then use Nero (or a comparable CDRW application) to create the VCD for you. Turning them into VCD’s may even be the better route since VHS content is already low resolution. If you choose to go with a DVD burner, then you’ll be faced with two major DVD formats – the DVD-R format and the DVD+R format. Both formats has it’s own virtues and I will not debate this right now. If you’re not sure what you want, then you can always choose the Sony multi format burner (model DRU500A ) that is now available for around $325 or so.

And finally – make sure you have plenty of hard drive disk space. Captured DV takes up tons of space as we will soon see.

For my own setup, I chose to use a Pioneer DVR-104 internal IDE DVD burner which is also known as the “SuperDrive” in the Mac world.

2.4 Software

The Windows world doesn’t offer all of the excellent free software that you’ll find on an Apple system. There is no iDVD or iMovie to do what we need to do. However, there are other applications available that often make things more flexible on the PC platform than the Apple platform.

2.4.1 Video Capture

First off, we’ll need software to perform video capture. We can use the free Windows Movie Maker application to capture DV from the firewire port or use high end packages like Adobe Premiere 6.x to do the same thing. There’s plenty of software that will help capture DV. Our goal here is to capture the DV video straight to AVI format without compressing the DV footage.
It’s important to note that since we are not compressing the DV footage initially, we will need a lot of disk space. How much space you might ask? On average, 1 hour of DV footage consumes roughly 13GB of disk drive space. Pretty big huh?

2.4.2 MPEG Encoding Software

Once the video capture has been done, we’ll need to encode the video into the target platform’s media format. You can use programs such as TMPGEnc or Nero’s VCD Encoder in the popular CDRW application. Since I will be creating a DVD, I need my video to be compressed in MPEG2 and thus I trust that job to TMPGEnc. You can use other encoders if you wish.

2.4.3 DVD Authoring Software

The final step in all of this is the DVD authoring step. We’ll need software to design the DVD menus and integrate the MPEG2 file that was encoded in the previous step. Popular programs include Sonic’s DVDIt! And MyDVD for beginners. Check out Uleads’ DVD Workshop as another DVD Authoring solution. For this article, I’ll use Sonic’s DVDIt PE 2.5.2. Here’s one area where the Apple does one better than Microsoft. There’s no such thing as iDVD on the Windows platform though MyDVD from Sonic comes somewhat close. However the only way you can get MyDVD is hopefully through the vendor that manufactures your DVD burner.

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