I got a handycam about a year ago that uses MiniDV tapes. Sony's software that came with it to capture the video to your PC turns tricks and blows dogs for quarters. It is awful, as in recording terrible video resolution (worse than youtube quality) but preserves the audio on a Mbit density with no compression with no options to reconfigure the capture settings. This results in nice audio on a crappy video that takes up 11 GB for 1 hour.

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for software to capture video from a camcorder, either a workstation on campus that I don't know about, or some other software available on the internet.

If not capture, then maybe if someone knew of software I could use to recompress my videos so that the audio track doesn't bloat the file size to 120x what it should be.

Thanks!

adobe premiere has all that built in the last time I used it, it can connect to the camera via firewire and you can setup what it rips at.

not free but can be found

Very true, but Premier (at least the version I have access to) requires a CPU with SSE2 support, which wasn't standard on AMD chipsets until recently, and unfortunately not on mine.

So Premier is out, at least on my machine, unless there are campus machines somewhere that use this software.

i havent used it since just having a video in card, but pinnacle might have firewire support, also floats around