Video Capture?

[QuackingPenguin]

Ok...
My dad is in this preservation society, and they wanna make a video, and one of the other guys has a video camera, and they're gonna use that. thing is, they thought maybe some of the members and stuff would like a cd-copy, eg: VCD. now this is the hard part:
i have a burner (for making the subsequent cd's)
i have a g4 with os X (perfect for video work, if not wanting for a faster chip)
i have imovie 2, cleaner 5, and shit-loads of codecs (btw; are there any decent codecs avail for X? i had heaps for 9: sorenson, intel Indeo, blah blah blah) for os9, but there is one thing i dont have:
a video frickin capture card. sure i have firewire, and at a push i MIGHT be able to convince them to use a rented DV camera... but this doesn't solve the problem completely though... This isn't going to be the last time i want to play around with digital video. So: any suggestions on how to get video from a vcr-tape into my g4?
i have firewire as stated before, and the stock Rage128Pro. the 3 PCI slots are free.

Thanks in advance.

QP

 

[Gwailo]

You need a Digital to Analogue Converter (DAC). This is a box ranging from a full VHS/VHS-C/DV deck to a credit-card sized box with only RCA/i.Link ports.

You'll find one at a local college with a cinema program, since the FireWire port on macintosh doesn't accept Hi8 input over i.Link (like it natively accepts DV input)--FireWire CAPTURE cards do.

You'll likely have to use the DAC in their labs, since they can start at a few grand they would be foolish to let it out of their sight. We've got a bunch at our college's cincom lab.

If nobody will let you in, try seeing if a local computer store will rent you one.

BTW if you do this in a remote lab, get ready either to burn a million CDs or get a FireWire external disk drive. I dumped a lot og Hi8 in my cincom lab onto my LaCie 80GB FW disk drive, works beautifully.

Good luck,