Some of my Yr 10’s brought in their own analogue video camera to make their film. This presented us with a problem — how do we convert analogue to digital for editing on a computer.

Solution: we played the video camera into the set-top DVD Recorder  (a Panasonic DVD/VCR HDD Recorder/Player) in the library which was attached to the TV’s, then recorded (and finalised) the movie to a disk. I then took the resulting disk which was recorded as an actual playable DVD – VOB file, and converted the VOB file into an AVI file using WinAVI Convertor …. which I then saved to my portable hard-drive and brought back to school to put on the school computer for editing.

HICCUP: — the school computers would not play the AVI file because we didn’t have the correct codecs installed so after an urgent page of the tech boys — the correct codecs were downloaded and the students were ready to go !!!