A friend of mine is trying to convert some video from a standard VHS tape to digital, and host it on his firm's website. #1 - What hardware/software is good? Should it be left to the professionals, or attempted by curious tinkerers? #2 - Anyone know of a good tutorial or want to share advice on the basics of compressing and hosting video clips? We're probably talking 5 minutes of video tops, and the traffic would not be heavy. He's a lawyer, wants it to be part of his bio on the site. So the compression doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough so it will download at a reasonable rate. Thanks in advance.
Many digital video cameras have rca inputs, you could run the vhs tape through the digital camera and get it in digital format. Also, Pinnacle makes a DVC80 that you can run RCA or svideo inputs into the device and send it to your computer through a usb port. Costs about $40
I would recommend to get a WinTV PCI tuner card. It is the best I have seen as far as not having problems with MacroVision. As for software, if you're wanting to go to MPEG, I would recommend WinDVR. If you're wanting to go to AVI or WMV, you may want to check out Blaze Media Pro's video capture feature.
I have all the equiptment setup over here, and you can pm me with more details for a quote. It would definantly be cheaper than a "professional firm" and would probably even be cheaper than buying all the equiptment. Here is what I have, and it works very well. A Canopus analog to digital converter, Final Cut Pro, Discreet cleaner, 2 powerbooks, and several lacie external hard drives. Hope that helps some.