Advice on how to connect a CCD camera to a PC.

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slowmotion

Quite dreadful
Location
lost somewhere
I have a tiny camera in our nest box and it's giving some great pictures on our TV of blue tits building a nest. I would like to record and store some of them on my laptop.
The camera is a quite high resolution (700 TV lines) Sony EFFIO CCD Camera which gives a Composite Video and Audio output. I borrowed a Composite Video to USB interface, a Climax Digital VCAP303, and loaded the drivers and video editing software by ArcSoft, but the images are pretty bad. My laptop has VGA, USB and HDMI I/O ports and runs at 2.6 GHz. Can any of you good people recommend a fix that could let me capture some decent images, preferably at low cost?

Thank you.
 
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slowmotion

slowmotion

Quite dreadful
Location
lost somewhere
[QUOTE 3540218, member: 9609"]they're building already ?[/QUOTE]
A lot of activity since last Friday. There is quite a lot of moss and small twigs on the floor of the box, but it's not fully covered. They go in and out and fluff it all around with their wings and bodies. The box has a couple of translucent plastic "windows" on either side at high level to let in more daylight. One of the tits spends a bit of time carving notches on the "window cill" with its beak. I read that this is classic territory marking behaviour. I never knew anything about birds really although Lady Slowmo is an expert. I'm finding the whole thing increasingly intriguing.
 
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slowmotion

slowmotion

Quite dreadful
Location
lost somewhere
[QUOTE 3540229, member: 9609"]was the box empty or is this stuff left in from last year[/QUOTE]
It was brand new and I screwed it on to our cherry tree a week ago, three and a half metres up, away from the hateful cats that visit. I'm pretty sure I'm a new landlord. My efforts at posting a recent image have just failed. I don't know anything at all about manipulating or posting video images. Nada.
 
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[QUOTE 3540218, member: 9609"]they're building already ?[/QUOTE]
They are around here as well, not to mention the squirrels building new dreys.
The birds have very definitely decided spring has arrived. The dawn chorus started up big time a few days ago and even the ducks have laid eggs constantly through winter this year, although occasionally like today 1 of the pair had not laid an egg, but she is still laying most days!
 
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slowmotion

slowmotion

Quite dreadful
Location
lost somewhere
What about turning your pc into a tv with a tv card and recording? Most tv cards come with software to record what you're watching
That's an interesting idea. I've got a 1.8 Ghz desktop and a 2.6 GHz laptop. I'm guessing that I'd need to use the faster machine. Would that be correct? If so, can you get externally mounted TV cards?
 
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slowmotion

slowmotion

Quite dreadful
Location
lost somewhere
[QUOTE 3540218, member: 9609"]they're building already ?[/QUOTE]
Here's a rather bad still picture of the pile of twigs and moss that they are building up. You can see the beak gouges on the window cill, top left.
2015_2_17_16_1_41.jpg
 

fossyant

Ride It Like You Stole It!
Location
South Manchester
I assume the camera isn't far away from the Laptop - signal can deteriorate with analogue quite quickly over a number of metres. How does the current video camera record - DVD, memory card or tape ?

The other option is to leave it recording and edit later on the PC ! I have an old Dazzle AV unit for the PC that worked well, but it's way out of date now (for a video tape camcorder) My son uses my FIL's old Sony DVD camcorder, and then converts the DVD format to MP4 on his computer rather than use a USB/AV INPUT stick we have been given.
 
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