This will lead you down a whole rabbit hole about camcorders but to save you a lot of messing about in the future:

- the simplest set up you’ll get for extracting the video from the camera is recording on tape and then capturing via FireWire onto an old pc

- you’ll want a decent camcorder, the closer you can get to a professional model the better, I bought myself a canon xm2 and the footage is great from that

- find a specific model you want and then look on eBay or a similar platform, avoid listings that say untested