hooking a mac pro up to an rca cable

The standard Mac Pro does not have NTSC composite Video input.

In this day and age, you should seriously consider an outside service to copy your archives to digital formats and import the digital data directly.

Also consider selling that camera on eBay and getting one that has a direct digitized Video output, which can be used with USB or FireWire.

Mac Pro's not only don't accept NTSC composite video input, they don't video input at all! But knowing that Elgato makes video input devices for computers I found the following:

Elgato Video Capture

And that does accept composite video input and connects to your Mac via USB.

For possible other alternatives google "composite video input for a mac".

askap wrote:

any reason I should buy that over this?

http://www.amazon.com/EasyCAP-DC60-Creator-Capture-High-quality/dp/B002H3BSCM

Sometimes I wonder about amazon. I also found that same device on amazon under the title:

EasyCap DC60+ USB2.0 Video Capture Grabber For Mac OS XP Vista Win7

And it has only one not very positive (and weird) review.

And even the link you point to has more negative reviews than positive.

Of course to under $10 maybe you get what you pay for and at that price you have nothing to loose except a few bucks.

If you are looking for possible alternatives for what I posted google "composite video capture for the mac". It has a bunch of hits but I did not check any of them out.

as the saying goes, close but no cigar. what you'd want is some kinda video input box/board, which will allow interfacing with the rca cable. Try blackmagic or elgato's tv tuner usb plugin dongle, maybe matrox. Dunno what your budget is, though. Elgato's video capture may work, but the software is designed to record video only, which is not quite what you had in mind, methinks

well, hope this helps

John b

askap wrote:

any ideas how to make the elgato video capture work as just a video feed, rather than a recording device? I'm trying to hook it up so that my video program can see it as just a camera

Both the EasyCap and Elgato devices have composite connections so I would think you just connect them to the camera (assuming it has composite output) using RCA cables. That's two cables for the audio and one for the video. Alternatively two cables for the audio and one s-video cable for the video.

I am not sure why Johnb-one says they are video only.

Not sure what to tell you. Is it a limitation of that software? If you bring up something like Photo Booth does it's Camera menu allow you to select your camera and is there a live picture when you do? Is there a similar menu in your media program?

There is one thing missing:

"Supports Mac OS X"