There are many external video grabbers that directly digitize analog input to some PC video format. The problem with some of those converters is, that you end up with a video file containing all footage from the tape between the start/stop button click.
Would sound good and easy to use on the first thought... But you will likely never click the recording 'start' and 'stop' button on exactly the right 1/60 or 1/50 of a second.
And you will find old tapes with either
hundreds of single scenes... waiting to be selected, split and trimmed to become a movie, or
some compilation of multiple short films, that need to be split, maybe have a title added and saved as single video files.
So there is no way to bypass some - even simple - video editing. If you convert with a cheap analog-USB converter you get an already encoded video file that needs to be decoded by a video editing software to get more out of the old tapes... like simple color correction, saturation and/or contrast improvement... and re-coded for the final export again.
A better way is to get a simple but powerful video editing software and a compatible USB-Analog converter, that digitizes directly into the editing software, keeping the highest quality as long as possible. Just one final encoding after the video has been made better, or a nice movie has been made from separate scenes.
The simply solution are found on Amazon: [amazon_auto_links id="2511"]
For an improved workflow, we recommend this great combination: