I totally agree here. Get a DVD recorder for this kind of job. Something like a Pionner (with Harddisk if possible). A procamp and a small Behringer or Mackie mixer would also be very usefull...

I once got a Pyro DV converter and sold it later. Very mediocre recording quality.

To be honest you really need to start with something with a TBC to get good results out of VHS. The ADVC 300 has both a TBC and DNR (noise reduction) as well as many other picture tweaks you can apply during capture. Using that would save a lot of time encoding and achive improvements that cannot be achieved after capture.
Alternatively a 2nd hand D8 camera offers both TBC and DNR but without the ability to tweak anything during capture.
Realtime hardware encoders may do a good job if the bitrate is kept high and they have a TBC, the noise is the killer with VHS. Most STB recoders at least seem to have a TBC but even so we've had problems with noisy video ending up really bad using them.
Bob.

> I totally agree here. Get a DVD recorder for this kind of job.

For straight dubs I would agree, but I failed to mention that after I finish this batch of tapes I’d like to be able to use it for tapes where I don’t want the whole thing. We have tons of 6 hr VHS tapes with maybe two shows that the kids want to keep so I need to be able to select from several section of the tape and make a compilation DVD. (maybe several tapes per DVD maybe cut out the commercials if I’m feeling particularly nice that day)

> I once got a Pyro DV converter and sold it later. Very mediocre recording quality.

Which Pyro DV converter? I have the Pyro A/V Link it and it captures with outstanding quality and, IMHO, truer colors than the Canpous ADVC 100 (which is why I bought it instead of the Canopus) The early A/V Links had capture problems (with dropped frames) but never quality problems. The new ones (Rev C Firmware 3.3) are rock solid.

Conclusion:

Well, I got the ADS Instant DVD 2.0 yesterday and all I can say is WOW! The quality was really great. I took a rather old tape and use the noise reduction (both spatial and temporal smoothing) with VBR 8Kbps encoding and did a direct to disc transfer and the results on the DVD looked better than the original tape. Definitely less noise than the tape had and excellent quality. I would say just as good as I was getting by capturing with the A/V Link, then processing through VirtualDub and then rendering to MPEG2 with Vegas. With several hours of processing cut down to real-time, I very happy with this unit.

~jr

This is being done with USB 2.0 instead of firewire? Do you have any A/V sync issues when you get past the 1 hr mark? (very subtle, but getting even worse towards the end) If not, exactly how are you capturing? (So I may describe it to a friend, who has this 'Instant DVD', who is a beginner, and I'm having trouble trying to help him because of distance and not at all being familiar with ADS. I wasn't too crazy about the manual, without having the product to work with.)

Yes, I’m using USB 2.0 which actually has greater bandwidth than firewire. The problem is, firewire has no CPU overhead while USB is very CPU intensive (which makes firewire a better choice) So knowing that I have a P4 3.0Ghz PC is probably important too. If you friend has a slower PC that might add to the problem of USB capture. I’m also capturing to a separate SATA hard drive that I use for my DV and HDV captures.

I’m capturing using a custom preset VBR 8Kbps, DVD MPEG2. I have not tried to capture for a full hour yet. The tapes I’ve done so far have been ½ hr shows direct to DVD bypassing the hard drive. Since this is a waste of DVD space I’m going to start capturing them to my hard drive and place two shows on a DVD.

I will have to try a longer capture over 1 hr and see what happens. I do have some shows that are over an hour that I want to convert so I’ll let you know how I make out after doing one. Part of the problem may be that we (you and I) have PC’s that are tuned for video capture and your friend just has any old family PC so their results will vary.

~jr

Are you able to capture directly into Vegas or do you have to use the ADS/Ulead utility? Also, is there a way to capture as uncompressed or DV?

I was looking at one of the Plextor hardware capture boxes but they appear to be limited to bit rate "settings" instead of allowing a user defined capture rate. If yours can be set to any bit rate, i may have to get one of the ADS boxes...

> Are you able to capture directly into Vegas or do you have to use the ADS/Ulead utility?

I use the ADS Utility to capture. It has controls for the noise reduction (spatial and temporal noise removal) so I don’t think I’d want to capture in Vegas for what I’m doing. Also the Instant DVD only captures MPEG1 or MPEG2 which is exactly what I wanted but NOT what you want for editing in Vegas.

> Also, is there a way to capture as uncompressed or DV?

Not with Instant DVD but I also own the ADS Pyro A/V Link which captures analog to DV in Vegas so I already have the Analog/DV capture capability with the A/V Link. I don’t think there is any way you could capture uncompressed with either box.

> I was looking at one of the Plextor hardware capture boxes but they appear to be limited to bit rate "settings" instead of allowing a user defined capture rate. If yours can be set to any bit rate, i may have to get one of the ADS boxes...

For the Instant DVD you can define the capture rate from 1KBps to 15KBps in 1KBps increments. If you are going direct to DVD it will limit you to 9KBps or lower because that’s the highest rate that the DVD spec allows. This is for MPEG capture. The A/V Link is fixed at DV 720x480@13GB per hr (or the PAL equivalent dimensions).

Bottom line:

The reason I bought the Instant DVD 2 is because I wanted a hardware/real-time MPEG2 encoder with noise reduction. I am extremely happy with the ADS Instant DVD 2 in this regard. If you want to do analog capture to DV for editing in Vegas then I would highly recommend the ADS A/V Link.

Now that I have both devices I can capture analog to either DV or MPEG depending on if I want to edit it (DV), or just archive it to DVD (MPEG).

~jr