Digitising camcorder tapes

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Hello. I want to be able to copy my old camcorder analog tapes (PAL Video 8) to my PC, edit out the rubbish etc organise the scenes and then burn DVD's. As I see it the camcorder outputs only analog video, which must be digitised. This can be done with a capture card on the pc, but I am not confident about the quality of the resulting files, especially recording scenes with much movement. (I have played around with an ATI All-in-wonder card). What I am particularly interested in is to use a DVD player/recorder such as a Panasonic DMRE50EBS to create "tape images" then to read those into the PC for subsequent editing and the production of decent DVD recordings. I guess what I really want to know is: (i) what is the quality of recording on a DVD recorder and (ii) is the format of the recorded DVD suitable for input to the PC.

Hope someone can help

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"This can be done with a capture card on the pc, but I am not confident about the quality of the resulting files, especially recording scenes with much movement."

This is definitely the preferred method.

With regard to movement, etc., all you have to do is use "TMPGEnc" or "TMPGEncPlus" as follows:

1) Select the "De-interlace" filter ("Even field[adaption]")
2) Use the DVD template/"wizard to convert to DVD-compliant MPEG-2 format

then

Use "TMPGEnc DVD Author" (a different program than "TMPGEnc") to easily create the required additional DVD files and structure (and chapters and a menu, if you wish)


**If the combined filesize of the DVD "package" written to your hard drive is greater than 4.37Gb, use DVD Shrink (or similar) to compress


If your O/S is either Win2000 or WinXP, TMPGEnc DVD Author can also burn your DVD. Otherwise, use NERO to burn in "DVD-Video" mode
(As an alternative to "TMPGEnc DVD Author", you could use "DVDLab")


Let us know of your success ;>}

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Thanks for the info. However when I created hard disk files using my "All-in-Wonder" card and supplied software the image quality was poor. This was some time ago, but I remember that an 800*600 resolution was difficult to achieve. It appeared to be dropping frames. My PC has an 800MHz PIII with a 20Gb disc and I made sure it was doing nothing but the capturing.

Can you suggest capture hardware/software that will maintain quality? Thanks

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Further to the above....I've just copied this from a review of a Pinacle capture card ( Studio AV V8 )
"The software that comes bundled with this program is quite good for home use. But the analog capture is odious! I could not get this to work under Win XP (I cannot say for other Win OS versions nor other hardware configurations) and the resulting capture files are almost always corrupted. I use Win XP home with AMD 2000+ and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro, and changing video cards made no difference. The problem seems to be a .dll file that Pinnacle has yet to fix. After calls to both Pinnacle and Microsoft with no solution, I had to return the product for a refund. If you can spare the cash, go with the DV solution: buy a decent digital camcorder that has an analog to digital pass through and use that to transfer your old VHS tapes to your PC and enjoy the benefits of digital video all the while!"
This is what I want to avoid! And I don't want to buy a new camcorder yet.