Analog to Digital
 

All,

I'd like to get into the digital area and I thought I'd start by moving my Hi-8 stuff off of tape and through to DVD (step .5 will be to buy a DVD burner I guess). I don't own any NLE software at this point, just assume a strong PC with pleanty of HD space and cycles.

I found one thread that suggested the ADVC 100 by Canopus. Is this still a great choice? Should I look at other products?

http://www.canopus.com/US/products/advc-100/pm_advc-100.asp

Tanks for your assistance.

If a friend has a digital hi-8 camera you could pop your tapes in and use the firewire port to output to your pc. Might be a cheaper option?

kermie

It's my opinion that Canopus engineers top-notch products. I have been users of their DVRex and DVStorm products for 5 years now, and have always been pleased with the quality of their hardware. I haven't tested the product you reference, but it likely uses the same hardware codec found in the DVStorm.

As Kermie suggests, borrowing somebody's Digital8 cam would also do the trick.

There is another, but more involved way; you can capture through an analogue capture card, making sure that you capture full-field (i.e. 640x480 NTSC or 720x576 PAL), and then either capture straight to DV (if you have a fairly powerful PC), or do it afterwards in a seperate step (you may choose to do this if you will be doing a lot of editing with your footage in which case you may choose to use the HuffYUV lossless codec [1]).
I strongly recommend VirtualDub [2] whatever codec you use.
I have taken in some VHS material this way using the video-in on a Geforce 4 Ti4200 and was pleasantly surprised by the quality using huffyuv - at least on par with a DC30's mjpg at top quality (7:1 IIRC but someone correct me if I'm wrong).

Kai.

[1] http://math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html
[2] http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net

Using the ADVC100 (w/XDV) for SVHS output. It seems to be a solid little unit. For non composite stuff, it's more than adequate.

Regards,
Jason

I used the canopus advc100 with Xpressdv... sweet unit. No problems, no dropouts... good deal.

Bill

Thanks Everyone
 

Thanks for the feedback. I think I'll go ahead with the purchase of this product - the digital Hi-8 was a good idea I hadn't considered, but I can't track one down around here.

I was looking at another product from Europe but the price here in Canada is higher and the features appear not to be as strong.

Again thanks for suggesting alternatives, and for the feedback on this product.

I love my Canopus AVDC-100 and have since removed my Pinnacle AVDV capture card that came with Studio deluxe.