Recording overnight

[DDirector]

With me I have my parents old video camera. I want to record over night but the casettes only record 30min.

How do I do this?

Perhaps recording onto my laptop, but how?
- cables
- program

 

[Martin Weiss]

Has your camera firewire? then you can just hook it up to your laptop with an external firewire, and you are good to go. About 5 minutes to the gigabyte, with a terrabyte you will get plenty of space

You can use Quicktime pro, or soemthing like the software "Capture Magic".

If your camera only has analogue output, you will also need some sort of capture card. On eBay those are sold for a few dollars (taken that you won't need broadcast quality.)

 

[DDirector]

my camera does have firewire and I do have the cable, but my laptop does not have the firewire port. It only has the usb ports.

Only my desktop has the firewire, but its on the other side of the house.
Would there be another option instead of firewire?

 

[Tyler Black]

Can you use a firewire to usb cable? Most cameras come with them. One end has a mini firewire connector that goes into the camera and the other end is usb so you can hook up the camera to a computer. Unless the camera is REALLY old, it should be able to do this.

 

[James Press]

Maximum length of firewire is under 2m...

 

[Brandon Kraemer]

You might try the Eye TV box, converts video to usb, uses a DVR style software interface to record. You can network them too with a hack, so you could send video to the desktop on the other side of the house.

Or, you need about 16 tapes and a pot of black coffee.