Capture Hardware

Steve1010 wrote on 2/23/2004, 7:03 AM
I'm relatively new to the digital video side, and am wondering if someome could provide me with some advice on capturing Hi-8 and SVHS video, and converting it to DV. I'm considering purchasing a Canopus ADVC100 to accomplish this, but am not sure of the advantages I would get over captuiring with something much cheaper such as the Leadtek Winfast TV2000 XP card. What are the benefits of spending another $200 to obtain the ADVC100? Also, if Hi-8 video is converted to DV, can you still separate the audio/video tracks as you can with DV?

Thanks in advance...

Comments

TVCmike wrote on 2/23/2004, 9:30 AM
I'm considering purchasing a Canopus ADVC100 to accomplish this, but am not sure of the advantages I would get over captuiring with something much cheaper such as the Leadtek Winfast TV2000 XP card. What are the benefits of spending another $200 to obtain the ADVC100?

The advantages of the ADVC-100 are as follows:

* Locked audio/video synchronization - extremely important, and not guaranteed with most of the less-expensive analog solutions.
* Quality - of all the DV bridges in this price range, Canopus has the best image quality. You also won't have to rely on your computer to encode into DV in realtime, which can help prevent dropped frames.
* External DV preview - you can actually send your previews to an external monitor or television and save your workspace and part of your existing monitor for other controls.
* PAL and NTSC support - if you need to input or output to NTSC or PAL, this will handle all combinations thereof (though you need a real PAL input source or output sink).

If you're capturing older analog footage, it might be a good idea to jump up to the ADVC-300, which has extensive filtering and time base correction. This will help stabilize and clean your captured image significantly. If it's relatively new footage, say less than 5 years old, then you probably won't derive great value from it.

Also, if Hi-8 video is converted to DV, can you still separate the audio/video tracks as you can with DV?

There's no difference in the actual DV AVI format whether you create it from a DV bridge or you capture it from a native DV device like a miniDV camera.
RBartlett wrote on 2/23/2004, 12:57 PM
The Leadtek software has been ok for capture in my quite short tests.
I've stuck with a product from Showshifter.com for creating 4:2:2 MJPEG c.5MB/sec D1 captures. It has been designed to give sprocketed audio in AVI (and its own proprietary low overhead directshow capable wrapper (.ssf)).

It is a downside not being able to capture from Vegas directly. The TV2000XP has a flaw that isn't known by most NLEs. The preview overlay (pin) is degraded to quarter-D1 during any capture. Even though the capture can run to 768x576 PAL (square aspect pixels).

TV2000XP is multistandard. It is limited to SVIDEO input at best and has no output of its own. In fact I'd say that is the main benefit of an external bridge. Some of these take component or SDI inputs as standard. VHS barely deserves SVIDEO though.

he TV2000XP also should have a full 2 field TBC on the front end. One of the disadvantages with analogue cards is that they need you to provide shielded high quality interconnect cables. With a TBC in-line, you need quality all the more to make it worthwhile having that extra insertion. What you financially gain is about $200 more in your pocket than a analogue-DV or analogue-TBC-DV.

Vegas isn't able to pass MJPEG through untouched. You could up to uncompressed but most people don't dabble with this as they fear the file sizes and the increased likelihood of a frame loss. I've not seen a frame drop since my PII 400 with 66MHz FSB, but I'm sure they all know better!

Clearly a lot comes down to pocket, workflow and target.
Old sages tend to write off the TV cards (Bt878/Cx23880 etc) as in their hayday they were unable to capture anything much more than a quarter-D1 (352x240 NTSC). This really isn't true with directx9 and WDM drivers.

If money is no object and you don't want the best chromakey work, choose the DV bridge or a PCI card which is DV25 at its heart. Otherwise hit the TV2000XP [watch for the Cx23881 versions with their 10bit ADC and comb filter as they have a slightly more patchy WDM support AFAIK, the older Conexant Fusion 878 isn't so far behind as it has better driver support - same for Leadtek or Hauppauge]. (next stop after that for SD is NewTek VT, BMD Decklink, Avid Mojo, Matrox Full DigiSuite, Leitch Velocity etc)

The DV bridge or DV based combo analogue+DV Pci cards (Canopus budget end) are generally more popular. Your VHS deck might have a TBC built in - worth checking. If your camera has analogue passthrough, or going to tape is indirectly an option (Hi8 playback capable Digital8 ccameras usually do either or both). Then the bridge and quite often the TBC isn't necessary.

If you look at ebay you might find a JVC HR-DVS1 or SR-VS10 (or 2,20 model pairings or 3,30). Not a very popular range of decks, but fine with Vegas and probably the tidiest cable wise.

Ignore the old Mjpeg Matrox and virtually all ATI integrated VIVO boards as the output quality is particularly poor in the ATI reviews/reports (the matrox rainbow runner series are just too old and are Pci video in only boards).

Good luck,