Web Video Transfer and Capture

Moving your video from your camera to your computer

Once you've taken your video, the next step is figuring out how to get it from your camcorder onto your PC or onto your Mac. The method for doing this falls into two methods – analog capture if your camcorder is tape based or file transfer if your camcorder is digital.

Capture Video from a Tape-Based Analog Camcorder

If you have an analog video camera, you need to perform what's called a video capture. Video capture is the process of converting the analog video recording on your camcorder into a digital format (example: avi, mpeg, quicktime) that your computer can recognize. The process for doing this may differ slightly depending on the type of computer you're using. You can find more details for capturing video to a mac and capturing video to a pc on this site.

Video capture presents the same problem you have if you want to publish a drawing you’ve made to the web. How do you get the paper with scribbles on it onto the web? The answer is that you have to use a scanner device that essentially creates a digital image of the drawing. This is what you need to do for analog videos too. You need to have software and a device that connects to your analog camcorder that creates a digitized version of your video.

Normally, the software you use to capture the video is part of your video editing software (example: iMovie for Mac, MovieMaker for PC). There are separate capture-only software programs as well.

Digital Video Transfer

If you have a digital video camera, this step is simple. You simply connect your camera to your computer, normally using a USB cable, then drag and drop the video file onto your computer for editing or uploading.