Video Input or Capture Process

Writing a thorough Video Capture guide is impossible due to the large amount of devices that are available on the market.
The way Digital Video editing has been done in the past was to take a video capture card, hook up VCR or LD player to it, and then capture clips to your hard drive. This is still a very viable method (and indeed the only good option open to you if you don't have DVDs).
A Video Capture card will usually have a video-in connector - either Composite video (the yellow plug with one prong that usually comes in a set of 3 along with a left and right audio connector) or S-Video (usually a black cable where the plug has four or six pins coming out of it). There are some with Component but if you have a card that does Component you don't need to be reading this guide.
Install Virtual Dub and then run it and select Capture AVI from the file-menu. If it comes up and says there is no capture device, most likely your capture card is not supported.
When you go to capture your video, change the color format to be YUV, YUY2, UYVY or something similar if the option is available. This will give you better compression later. Then select a video compressor.
Then select your capture resolution. First try 720x480 or 704x480 if it is available. If you try capturing with these and you get dropped frames, try lowering your resolution to 360x480 or 352x480 if you can. This will maintain all the vertical resolution and scan lines and simply drop half your horizontal resolution.
If you start to get dropped frames, make sure that "preview" is off, and you are either capturing with Overlay or blind since this will save CPU cycles. Also, obviously close all other programs and make sure you aren't doing anything else. Capturing video is very processor intensive. It's also recommended to have a lot of free space handy on whatever drive you're capturing too, as well as decrementing the drive. Defragmentation can give HUGE speed increases (in the neighborhood of 3x speed increase) when it comes to working with large files.
Tips: The video you capture will only be as good as the source it came from. If the tapes are worn, the captured footage will reflect that. Try and store your old tapes in a cool, dry place. Before recording, "pack" your videotape by fast-forwarding to the end of the tape and then rewinding back to the beginning before playing. This will allow for smooth playback while capturing the video.

If your source device has S-Video output, make sure you use that instead of composite (RCA) video output. S-Video delivers a much higher picture quality than composite video.
If you want to capture lots of video to burn to DVD, make sure you have a large hard drive, or better yet, use a separate hard drive for storing video.





Devices Required:
A Computer
A Video Capture Device
Video Capture Software
If you want to edit your video, you will need Video Editing Software
If you want to record your video to DVD you will need DVD Recording software
You will need a DVD Burner to physically record the DVD