How can I make a home movie? I have a mini dv camera and windows.
So you want to make a movie eh? The big question is what hardware and software to get. It’s all going to depend on what type of video your making. If it’s some grand indie film then your needs are obviously going to differ from someone trying to film their kid’s first steps. I’m going assume that it’s the latter and you need it for vacations and things like that.
First you’ve make a pretty good choice going with mini dv. I don’t really like the Hard Drive cameras because they compress the video much more so than digital tape. The only better choice you could have made is by going HD but you may not need that (expensive) quality for your needs.
First you want to shoot your video making sure that your recording on tape rather then the memory card (it does happen) then you need to find a way to transfer that video to your computer. The best way to do this would be to use a firewire cable and capture card.
The firewire cable may or may not have come with your camera. The usual way these things work is that you get a 4 pin to 6 pin cable (little end to big end.) The 4 pin end will plug into your camera and the 6 pin into your computer. Now if you have a laptop chances are your going to have a 4 pin port on the unit itself so all you have to get is a 4 pin to 4 pin cable (but make sure that you have firewire as some laptops don’t come with the firewire port at all.)
If you computer doesn’t have a firewire port then you need to buy a capture card. These should generally be no more then 50 bucks and you should get about three ports. On a desktop you can get a PCI card and on a laptop a PCMCIA expansion card. (You can also buy USB devices but those are tediously slow.)
After you’ve installed all the necessary hardware you need some software to be able to import the video stream into a file. If your just beginning your video making experience Windows Movie Maker is a basic editing studio (which you’ll quickly outgrow) that comes on every Windows computer from Windows ME and up and should do fine for your needs at the moment.
So plug in your camera and Autoplay will display it’s dialog box. Choose the option to import video into Movie Maker and follow the on screen prompts. The video will now reside on your hard drive and you can use Movie Maker to slice and dice all of it!
When you’ve outgrown Movie Maker try moving up to Pinnacle or if your a Pro then only Premiere or Final Cut Pro will do.
Happy editing!
The Fake Geek.