camcorder connection to PC

[felicia777]

Have a four year old sony handycam digital 8 camcorder and recently purchased the usb cable. My computer is not recognising the camcorder, and I don't have CD to download. Other than going to sony shop is there another way to view film from camcorder to PC.

[KevSparky]

If your camcorder has a video out port, like Composite Video or S-Video, that you would normally use to watch the camcorder on a TV, you can buy a relatively cheap video capture card(either USB or PCI interface) put it into your computer, then hit play on the camcorder, and record on the PC and it will work away for you.

This has 2 down sides, 1. You need to wait for the entire video to play out instead of just downloading it (as yours is a digital camcorder) and 2. Digital Camcorders are usually high quality, and using an interface like Composite Video or S-Video (which were around during the time of VCRs) will cause loss of quality in the transfer. For normal home use, however, neither of these should be an issue for you.

[benalva02]

Aunsoft Final Mate, a great and useful camcorder assistant software, has everything needed to directly capture/backup AVCHD (*.mts, *.m2ts), AVCHD Lite, AVCCAM, NXCAM, TOD, MOD recordings from Hard Disk Drive/SD Card Camcorders to PC, to import, edit and create spectacular movies on a timeline. It is also powerful enough to play/convert native 1080 60p/50p footages and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround.

Powerful timeline-oriented editing features like split/trim video, splice clips, crop, do color correction, deinterlacing, replace audio, adjust volume, etc help you create satisfied film results. Merge/combine avchd (*.mts, *.m2ts), AVCHD Lite, TOD into only one file without any re-encoding or recompression.

Export/convert edited camcorder video to other editors (Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, WMM, Pinnacle Studio, etc), media devices (iPad, iPhone4, droid x, nokia n8, galaxy s, hdtv, projector, etc), or common formats (mov, avi, wmv, mp4, mpg, mpeg-2, etc) with the high quality and least amount of clicks. Ultra extreme performance with support for NVIDIA® CUDATM and Intel while encoding.

http://www.aunsoft.com/final-mate/