Digital 8 pass-thru or ADVC300?

goshep wrote on 11/14/2005, 9:30 PM

I've been using a Sony Digital 8 for video capture since I started using Vegas. It has always worked fine as I've only needed to capture with it. Recently, an opportunity has presented itself which may necessitate an upgrade to Canopus. I'm trying to sell a company on transferring an entire library of reference material to DVD. A huge selling point would be restoration of these tapes (some of which are from the early 80s). From what I've read, the ADVC300 is able to clean up noise such as that found on degraded VHS tapes. Based on the age and degenerated quality of some of the tapes, would it be a worthwhile investment? The cost of the ADVC would amount to almost a third of my proposed fee. I don't want them to have unrealistic expectations of resultant quality so any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Comments

farss wrote on 11/15/2005, 3:32 AM

Nothing beats getting the very best possible signal off the tape in the first place, so look for one of the old dubbing machines, I'm told they do the best job and have a lot of manual tracking controls which can help a lot.
I use both my D8 camera and the ADVC-300, the 300 is certainly more convenient and does allow you to tweak things on the fly. Thing to know is the D8 gear has a full frame TBC whereas the 300 has a line based TBC, depending on the problems you are having with the tapes one may work better than the other.

All that said though, although you didn't say how much material is involved if the cost of the 300 is almost 1/3rd of the value of the job I think you're under quoting, I've spent many hours manually cleaning up 30 minutes of VHS tape.

One thing about the 300, unlike the D8 gear it handles PAL and NTSC.

Bob.