Analogue to Digital Converter For best results a dedicated analogue to digital converter is recommend option, depending on budget most of leading brands such as Canopus, Matrox, Avid, Pinnacle have such products which because they are dedicated take much off burden away from computers CPU

To summarise, analogue to digital conversion is ideal for those on a budget where quality is not of paramount importance. Taking you VHS recordings and transferring them to DVD format will offer an extension to short life of old VHS material to.

Speed?

Its worth considering your Pc's Processor speed, speed will effect rate your video will encode, encoding is where your DV video clips are converted into a more compressed format, for example DVD's are encoded to MPEG2. So faster better really. Also consider amount of RAM in your PC, 256Mb would be minimum.

Extra Hard Drive Storage

Its worth considering having an extra dedicated drive for your video footage, remember that five minutes of DV footage uses 1GB of hard drive space so consider a large capacity hard drive such as an 80Gb or 120Gb, also consider disk drive RPM, at least 7200RPM would be recommended. If your PC supports it (most new ones do now), then a Serial ATA (SATA) drive will offer increased date transfer rates of up to 150MB/sec compared to 100 or 133 offered by IDE drives, you may also consider a SCSI drive if you’re PC has an SCSI adapter as standard.

DVD/CD Burners

If your planning on putting your film onto CD-ROM (VCD), or DVD then a CDRW or DVDRW is an essential piece of kit, most new pc's may have a CDRW or DVDRW as standard, to burn your DVD, you'll need DVD authoring software. Video Editing Cards If you have and older analogue video camera/deck then an analogue USB or PCI capture cards will suffice. These dedicated analogue to digital converters take process of conversion away from CPU and therefore speeds up transfer. If worth getting a quality capture card as cheaper cards can produce mixed results,

The Video Editing Software

This is where all your creative work starts and creative work starts, you can capture video from your camera, edit captured clips, arrange them into a sequence, add transitions, credits and a soundtrack, titles and when your ready export your movie back to camera or a suitable encoded file format (DVD, VCD etc).