We have an old Sony camcorder... when I say old, it dates from 1999/2000 and uses tapes.
However it is a digital camcorder and has a DV interface which can be used via firewire.
I had to buy a cheap PCI firewire card and a standard firewire cable and then I was away.
Pretty well any video editing suite is capable of capturing video from a camcorder.
I do it very infrequently and don't know much about video editing so have tended to use Windows Movie Maker for the video capture. I can capture it as WMV 640x480 resoultion at a high frame rate and it looks good on screen.
I tried fitting the PCI card in my Dell system (2007) but the stupid thing refuses to boot Windows when I add PCI cards (it was seriously annoying - firewire, serial, modem, sound cards you name it it doesn't like them - in any spare slot).
A bit annoyed, i swapped my Dual core Dell PC with my brothers PC which I built for him and can now add PCI cards freely.
Firewire is ALOT easier than using analogue capture on a PC. If the camcorder has a Digital Video (DV) interface then the PC can control the tape as well i.e. play, pause, stop, RW, FF etc which is good.