by Not long ago my dad was cleaning up his room closet, he managed to find an old Panasonic camera I purchase a long time ago for myself. I give it to him many years ago, since I didn’t really use it.
I was curious what was on the tapes, amazingly the batteries still charge and I got the camera working. found out that there’s a bunch of old videos of my family! Some going all the way back towards the mid-2000s. Some of These videos have family members who are not with us anymore and none of these videos are archived.
So I have a mission, Video Transfer these’s old family video memories and save them.
With this being an older camera, what I needed was an older computer to make it work. Just happened to be I have just made a retro PC not too long ago. I know that I needed a firewire connection and older software to get the videos. First I needed a firewire port. I happen to have an Audigy sound blaster card with a firewire port. After successfully installing the card and driver’s, I began to work on getting software for the transfer.
Getting The Software Installed
The software I’m using is an older copy of Sony Vegas. I remember using software with this camera, so I know it going to work. But while trying to install it I have few issues. The computer only has a regular CD-ROM drive and the disk was a DVD. I have a portable DVD drive that works great with Windows XP.
Then of course it wouldn’t install At first. I thought that Windows wasn’t up to date. So I tried to install service pack 3 on it. But it wouldn’t install either! I also tried installing service pack 2, I knew it should work but it didn’t. After stumbling around for an hour, I realized that I disable a lot of services trying to optimize the performance on the computer. The cryptographic service was disabled preventing the installers from working correctly. After enabling the cryptographic service, I was able to install both service pack 3 and Sony Vegas.
The capture software worked great and Listening to the old type drive in the camera work while I control it from the computers was fun. After learning to use it, I transfer all the videos then I copy them over to a USB stick.
Watching my old family videos, was a nostalgia trip for me. I’m sure my family will enjoy seeing these videos when I show them. I got to admit, modern cameras make it much easier, but there is something about using these old cameras with firewire and hearing that tape drive work.
