[stomachmonkey]

1st, forget a USB device. Firewire or PCI card.

2nd, a good mini DV camera can be had cheap and most have a pass thru feature. They will accept your analog source, HI 8, VCR etc.. and pass it straight to the computer via Firewire.

3rd, video takes a huge amount of memory. Ideally you want to save at least the raw dump from input as uncompressed to preserve full quality. It's a bit more complicated than this but let's do some math anyway: video is 30 frames per second, a frame is just about one mb, so one second of video is 30 mb's, you can see where this going. Add the cost of a good quality 300 gb drive to your purchase.

4th. Video capture takes time, an hour of video takes an hour to capture, you can't exceed the tape speed of the output device. Then add in any processing and compression for intended output, web, DVD etc.. and it gets time consuming.

I recomend taking an inventory of the amount of footage that you have, figure out what a service would cost to convert. Then compare it to how much it will cost to kit you out and make a choice.

84porsche,

You can use a laptop to do video. You just need to have either 7200 rpm external drives or get 7200 rpm laptop drives like I have in 2 of my 17 inch Powerbooks.

I edit video using Final Cut all the time, no problem.

As far as Macs for the consumer I highly recommend it as a solution. iMovie has a feature that takes the video in feed and dumps it directly to a DVD. You basically press go and that's about it.

Scott