Video Downloading

[mick pinner]

A question for the electronic gurus, l realise that downloading my images from the SAC camera direct to the hard drive is the best way to capture images, in the meantime if l was to view images through a tv monitor and burn them to a disc on a dvd recorder and then transfer to hard drive how much loss of information and or image degredation would there be?

[bird]

Mick, the data coming out from the camera is analogue, making it prone to picking up noise and will also degrade over distance, so the first order of business is to make sure you have a good quality cable from the camera to the next device, e.g. to the recorder or tv.

I'd suggest that you want the analogue section to be as short as possible, and preferably only one section, so you might try camera->dvd recorder->tv. The image shown on the TV will have a bit more noise picked up in the last cable run but you're not recording that signal so it doesn't matter if it's a long-ish run. The main thing is that the camera to recording device cable is short and good quality.

The recording device will be digitising the signal to record to dvd or hard disk, so it's just up to you to choose which digitising device gets you the best quality - i.e. the dvd recorder or a frame grabber card in your PC. Once the data is written to dvd then it's digital and it can't degrade any further.

Most of the dvd recorders I've seen have internal hard disks, so you chould choose to record to that - effectively it becomes the same thing as using a frame grabber card and recording to hard disk on your PC.

regards, Bird

[mick pinner]

what is the purpose of the frame grabber card?, doesn't the camera automatically download and capture to a default file set up by the software.