using cineform to capture vcr tapes with canopus?
 

looking to capture some old family vcr tapes and want to update my setup with a new toy. i have a high end jvc vcr with svideo in/out (the one with the tbc in it). i also have the datavideo tbc-1000, proc-amp, and image enhancer to go with it.

now i need to decide on a capture device. i was looking at the canopus ADVC110 as a perfect little piece of equipment to add to my arsenal.

will my go pro cineform studio capture using this thing? im obviously trying to get the best picture quality that i can squeeze out of these old tapes. im thinking this is a pretty high end setup route to go.

anybody else have any better suggestions if perhaps this isnt the best route to go?

thanks

Re: using cineform to capture vcr tapes with canopus?
 

You would probably be better off going with capture device by Blackmagic-Design like their Intensity series which come in both as an internal add-on card or external device via USB3 and/or Thunderbolt (supports both PC/MAC). They are more than capable and will allow you to not only capture old SD formats but in HD via hdmi. Furthermore, if you are using Cineform Neo / Studio Premium, HDLink readily supports it directly via capture so no need to convert it to CF later on.

I have for a few years now used BMD Intensity Pro and very happy with it. I also own Grass Valley/Canopus ADVC110 and although its a nice device, its a bit dated, with a little delay between live feed and monitoring if that is important to you (unless you are using dedicated monitoring solution).

Re: using cineform to capture vcr tapes with canopus?
 

The ADVC110 converts s-video to DV25. Archive the DV25 files that the ADVC110 outputs without transcoding. Any capture program that works for a miniDV camcorder can record these files.

Re: using cineform to capture vcr tapes with canopus?
 

With a JVC HR-DVS1, I used the VHS to MiniDV dub route but found the firewire port would then route the image and sound directly to Premiere CS5 and capture manually.

The capture format was MiniDV. I cleaned it up as best I could in a HD cineform environment in Premiere.

The original tape was somebody's old VHS copy of a VHS rental. The recording therefore was in pretty bad shape. The timebase functions in the JVC are very handy but there remains some flagging on the top edge of the image.

Re: using cineform to capture vcr tapes with canopus?
 

Keep in mind that any of the DV-based solutions (i.e. ADVC-110) capture in the 4:1:1 color space (assuming you're NTSC.) If you then convert this to DVD, which is a 4:2:0 format, then you will end up at 4:1:0, which will only contain 12.5% of your original color information. The Black Magic Intensity will capture both HD and SD at 4:2:2 and it works great with HDLink that comes with Cineform Studio Premium. You can capture directly to the Cineform codec at 4:2:2 at data rates just slightly higher than DV. I use it all the time and the results are vastly better than capturing DV.

Bypass the TBC in the JVC VCR, feed S-Video into the TBC-1000 and feed that via S-Video into the Intensity, it will work great.