This page is intended to help you understand how you can create desktop and broadcast video from your Macintosh computer. Analog cameras store video on traditional videotape. Analog camcorders are common and relatively inexpensive.
Digital camcorders are less common and typically more expensive than analog camcorders.
Since computers deal only with digital information, outpu from analog cameras must be converted to digital before it can be edited in the computer. Digital cameras, on the other hand, can send video directly to a computer without conversion. There is a huge variety of options for getting video from you camcorder into you computer for editing. Digital 8mm - not really a tape format, but a Sony proprietery standard for digital camcorders. You could use this format to read an existing 8mm or Hi8mm analog tape into a FireWire-equipped computer for digital editing.