Hi Badger
I agree that you are probably better off getting some crowd to do it for you but if you want to do it yourself heres how.
In case you dont know anything about this at all, ill just tell you how to do audio first, as it is easier and you may have done that yourself before, and then ill compare that to video.
So lets say you have a tape walkman with a song you want on the pc.
1) Most pcs have soundcards these days, and they all pretty much will have a 'line in' connection. This will probably be a standard walkman jack.
2) So you get a walkman to walkman jack cable (3.5 to 3.5, male to male) (a couple of quid in maplin or peats). Using this, connect the walkman to the soundcard.
3) Using the sound properties of the computer, you tell it to look for sound in the line in connection. And you should then hear the song through the pc's speakers.
4) Then you need to record the sound. Most computers with windows, will have a program called windows media player (or people often have another called winamp). Using the sound properties again, you tell it to record from the line in (a separate setting to telling it to play from the line in). So while the song is playing, you can record it using media player (the basic sound format is wav). Then you can use media player to compress it to a wma file or mp3.
So now for video,
1) you need to get a video line in connection. The most common source for this is a fairly fancy graphics card. Some have it, some dont, so its just a case of seeing what you have. Another source is a TV card (a card for watching TV on the pc). This is what i have. These cards are normally fairly cheap (€30 - 90).
You can buy a specific video in card, but it will probably be just as expesive as the others, so you would be as well to get one of them.
2) the connection. This just depends on what the camcorder has and what the line in has. The line in, is normally an RCA (yellow) connection. This looks like the normal left and right audio connections usually on the back of stereo systems. Sometimes they have an S-video connection. This is the one that looks like a 9 pin circular connection. If you have the opposite one on the camcorder to the line in card, i assume you can get an adapter cable. Maybe its more complex than that, the lads in peats should be able to help you. Everything i have done has been RCA to RCA.
3) Watching the video. The audio equivalent is actually a stardard thing accross all pcs. However, the video in is a particular thing to whatever card you have. So they should have provided specific software that will display what ever it sees through the line in connection.
4) Recording the video. As above, the specific software should also give the option to record the data. This should be straight forward if you have a modern computer, but i dont so here are the problems you can face. Size: in terms of storage size, raw video is huge, so you definitetly need gigabytes free if you are editing video. Processing power: my computer is fairly old, so it actually couldnt save the video to the hard drive quick enough. So the resulting video was very jumpy. You can reduce the sample rate (quality) until you computer can keep up, but then that might defeat the whole point of the exercise. So id bear this in mind before spending money on a card. compressing the video. If you want to save the video forever more, or upload it to this website, you will likely want to compress it from its original raw state. This will reduce the storage size of the video, while trying to maintain quality as much as it can. Normally the software that does the recording can do this aswel. But if not, you can download off the internet.
But that, as they say, is another story......
