Hey there everyone

Shane, AV Manager at the Denver Art Museum writing my first thread. I hear you all are very knowledgeable so let's see how we do with this question.

At the museum we have a fantastic auditorium space where we regularly hold lectures and other presentations. Some of these lectures I am asked to tape and we have an old but adequate system to do so.
I currently take a RF signal into a Sony DVCAM deck and record to that format. This system works fine except no one uses DV Cassette format so I must then dub the DV tapes to DVD. This is a pain but still not so bad. The problem is now that I have more and more requests for digital copies of the recordings and also some DVD requests.
To do this I have a program installed on my work PC that can rip the DVDs with but this takes a long time and also destroys the titles and chapters I created initially during dubbing.
Ideally to combat all of this I would like to insert a device in lieu of the DVCAM that will except the RF signal, and record to a hard drive in a PC ready format to be loaded onto a shared network drive.
It would be great if the recordings could be edited with titles and chapters before being pushed over ethernet to a dedicated folder on the shared drive. I wouldn't even care that much if it just saved them to a hard drive that I could plug into my work PC and then edit them with software and manually load them to the network or burn them to DVD in my PCs burner.
I've been looking and looking and it seems there is no one stand alone product that can do anything like this. I wouldn't be opposed to having a few devices that worked as a system to accomplish this but trying to figure out exactly what it is I need and how to find it has begun to make my head hurt.
Any and all help regarding this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for the brilliant solution that will come my way, hopefully sooner rather than later.

 

If I understand correctly you just need the proper "capture card" for the computer. One that supports your recording devices output cables. Then a proper DVD authoring software. I'm sure there are many that automatically save to and avi format or whatever.

Does your "recording" device have USB or dv/Firewire output?

 

I don't yet have a recording device for the auditoirum system other than the DVCAM and no, unfortunately the SONY DVCAM DSR45 only has a RF out, S-Video out, and Component out.
I have found some that record to AVI format but don't support RF. Would maybe an RF>RCA converter in line enable me to use any DVR with composite video?
I feel as though getting the signal into a machine isn't as much of an issue (given all the converters on the market) as finding a device that will allow me to copy the files to an external drive after recording. Most seem great if you just want to stream live video to a PC and then capture there or if you want to dub the content to DVD.
My issue is that I am all alone in the AV Booth and I fear things would get clumsy if I were having to accomplish running AV for the presentation, filming/video switching, and monitoring the capture as well. I am confident in the audio and video I send to the DVCAM, I just need an updated way of recording and the ability to post those files on my PC to be edited and loaded to a shared network drive.
I may be over complicating this so I apologize if I create more questions than we answer.

 

Am I correct in assuming that if I can just find a DVR that saves its files in Standard definition or better and has the ability to back up those files to an external hard drive that I'd be set and could then simply acquire software to convert the DVR-MS files to AVI format and additional software to for editing and DVD authoring? If that's the case then just bouncing this off another brain helped tremendously.