From Your Camcorder to Your PC

If you want to edit your video on your computer, you first need to get your video on your computer. Using a USB connection or a FireWire (IEEE cable), this is a relatively simple process.

1. Install on your PC any software that came with your camcorder.
2. Connect the FireWire or USB cable to your computer and the other end to your digital video camera.
3. Turn on your camcorder. Your computer should automatically detect that the video camera is connected.
4. Transfer the video from your camcorder to your PC.
   • MiniDV or Digital8: Open the editing program of your choice and select "Capture" video from the menu.
   • Hard Drive, DVD or Flash Memory: Open the editing program of your choice and "Import" the files OR, viewing the directories on your computer, drag the video files from the "Removable Disk" directory (your camcorder) to a folder on your computer. THEN, open the files in the editing program of your choice.

These procedures can vary from camcorder to camcorder, so read your manual and/or the software documentation for detailed information.

Is Your PC or Mac Good for Video?

First, let's dispel a myth. PCs are just as good as Macs for editing video. Die-hard Mac people will disagree, and while our years of experience in this field have found definite differences in how the two work with video, we have not found many substantial advantages one way or another (when hardware horsepower is equal).

Both need a few things to handle the taxing nature of video effectively. Those things are:

1. Plenty of hard drive space. Video is big and will eat up a lot of your disk space. The amount of disk space required depends on how much video footage you want to keep on your machine. If you have less than a hundred gigabytes of free space, you will probably want to invest in a second internal or external hard drive.
2. At least 512 MB of RAM. That's the low end. Just enough. We recommend more, however.
3. A Pentium 4 or similar (try for a dual processor or one of the HT variety for added performance).

Without these things, you're likely to find yourself very frustrated with the whole video-editing experience.