I know the newer camcorders will take stills. Can they take the input from a VCR and produce still photos from that input? If so, can those stills be transferred to a computer? Sorry, I haven't kept up with these things, last one I owned was a VHS-C good for about 15 minutes of basic recording. Thanks Al
In theory, if you have the proper cables and the proper hookups on the cam corder, your first idea would be doable but maybe a little over architected. A more simple solution would be to get yourself a video capture card for your PC and feed your VCR into your PC to create video clips and/or still images with your PC from VCR. Jas
A lot of the newer camcorders use some type of flash memory to store stills. I.e Sony camcorders use Memory Sticks for storing digital stills. You can then remove the card from the camcorder and plug it into a card reader. Also, most newer camcorders are USB compatible and you simply cable up to the PC and download the picutures from the camera. I have a new Sony with the Memory Stick and find that a external card reader is the way to go. We are talking $20 for a universal reader..
Agreed Jim 100%, however, he's asking how to transfer images from VCR tape to his video camera or computer.
Al, Unless there's some reason to load it into your camera, I'd go direct from VCR to PC, as Jas suggested. Video capture cards go anywhere from $30 to over $1000. If you have just a few tapes, and don't want to go through the hassle of installing a card, you might consider a service bureau. Jim is correct about card readers--most are much faster than most cameras. For small batches, it doesn't make much of a difference, but if you're uploading 2 Gbytes, it sure does. The speed of the card also plays a big role.
I have a mini-Tv studio in a corner of my living room for a TV show I planned to produce and then it fell through after I invested $$$$. So I have this $2900 digital video camera and no digital still pictures. Except for old pictures captured on a scanner from snapshot prints, most of my model photos at http://railimages.com/gallery/kennethanthony were made by photographing on digital video (closest focus = 4 feet), capturing as avi movie file on computer with Matrox digital video card, using Adobe Premiere to freeze bmp stills from avi movies. Then bmp stills are loaded into Adobe Photoshop for cropping, color correction and adding title lettering, saved as jpg which doesn't take up so much storage in railimages and over internet. Since I am broke and have no regular job, this is all I have at present.
