How do you get videos from a Sony handycam video camera onto your computer?

There are a couple of ways to do it. If the camera is a DV camera, it will have a firewire connector as its digital video output. Older cameras will normally just have an analog video and audio output. First, the computer needs a firewire interface (also known as a 1394 interface) or a video capture card. Many new computers have firewire already installed but few will have an analog video capture card. Both interfaces can be bought as add ons. Once the interface is installed, video capture software is needed to ingest the video signal. Depending on the software package, it will be imported as AVI, for uncompressed storage that is good for editing or MPEG, for archiving with smaller file sizes. Other programs will allow the video to be written direct to a DVD.