NormsForum.com

[aahhaaa]

I picked up a Sony Digital8 camcorder a while back for peanuts on eBay. The model selection was somewhat tricky, I wanted the Analog to Digital passthru, which isn't a feature much discussed in the short blurbs, you need to see the manual to get into it.

So, FYI, here is a link to Sony's pdf library of camcorder manuals:
http://esupport.sony.com/perl/select-system.pl?DIRECTOR=DOCS

I also got an ILO, the R04 (which somewhat obsoleted the Sony A2D thing).

The results are awfully good as far as the video goes; I'm still struggling to get audio that suits me.

A program that I can recommend highly for fiddling your audio is Audacity, it's free and powerful: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

There are a number of good editing programs around, but for my Sony, AVID is free and will control the camcorder as a deck (which is useful if you are in a real hurry): http://www.avid.com/freedv/

Feel free to add any links, tips, etc...

[Normando]

Nice tips...

I was unaware of Avid FreeDV. I will have to check that one out.

I have a Panasonic DV Camcorder... the PV-DV402D. I was frustrated with searching through my tapes in realtime to find the good clips.

I found a great program that eased this process. It is called "Scenalyzer Live" It has a really cool feature where it will Scan an entire mini-DV tape for all scenes in 5 minutes. It will then show you all the clips in a storyboard like fashion with thumbnails so you can select which clips to batch capture. Select them, hit batch, and walk away while it does all the work for you. Pretty handy program and it only costs $39.

I bought it over 2 years ago, so I don't know if there is freeware software that does this. Get your trial version here:
http://scenalyzer.com/