I get by with DAZZLE Hollywood. You can pick it up at Best Buy or Circuit City. I know it's not the greatest but I bought when I first started doing video and it has been working faithfully for over two years now.

The Canopus ADVC-100 will do an excellent job the first time with no issues.

A couple years ago it ran about $300.

With thier new model out, it may cost a little less.

It is a first class converter and I will never be without one.

Note: For 50 tapes, you will need a LOT of hard drive space, depending on how you want to do it.

Two options, if you're doing that many tapes, I assume they're VHS?
I've used both a D8 camera and the Canopus ADVC-300. Both have time base correction and DNR. You could pcik up a broken Digital 8 camera maybe from eBay, you only need working electronics, if the transport etc has died doesn't matter.
The ADVC-300 does give you more control, you can tweak settings on the fly, sits well with VidCap.
Bob.

I had a Dazzle unit that I finally gave away. There were to issues with it: it would constantly lose horizontal sync and the quality of the captured video was bad. There were vertical lines running across the screen that you could see during dark scenes, or on a really good TV on every scene. The Canopus models are much better. That's what I use now.

If you are converting 50 tapes, I would take that money and buy a dual DVD recorder / VHS combo deck. Just load in the tape and a blank DVD and press the copy button. It will save you six or seven hours of rendering and authoring time per tape and they are just a couple of hundred dollars I believe. A job of 50 tape to DVD conversions should pay for that.

I would agree with the DVD recorder / VHS combo for the quantity involved. In fact, I always recommend this advice to the customer; to do it themself, it is really quite easy to do. However, for my occassionally use, I would recommend the Canopus ADVC-100 for about $200 on ebay. The ADVC-100 is also supported by Vegas 5. Although I have not yet done it, it is my understanding that the ADVC-100 can be used for external previewing.

Yes the ADVC-100 works really well for external previewing whereas the Dazzle does not. This is going to be the thing I miss most when I transition to HDV.

*Definitely* a DVD recorder job...

If you insist on NLE correction/editing, go for a Canopus unit. ADS was too low quality for me...

If you don't go the DVD recorder route, I throw in my vote for the ADVC-100. I love mine!

Kevin

If you're going down the ADVC route and you're doing 50 tapes you might find the extra bucks for the 300 money well spent, particularly if they're old tapes.
Bob.

>>...*Definitely* a DVD recorder job...

That's fine, assuming you don't want to do any editing of the videos.

That will essentiually just "slap it on a disk."

If that's all you want, then that would be the fastest.

Hey, wait a minute,... if you insert an ADVC 300 between the analog source and the DVD recorder firewire input, you could get video stabilization and every enhancement features without computer hasle and reconversion...

Anybody knows if the ADVC300 works as a stand alone A/D converter?

I dunno about the Canopus models, but my SONY DVMC-DA2 operates completely stand-alone. Heck, it operates stand-alone even when it's connected to a computer. You put analog in one side, digital comes out the other, and vice-versa too. It doesn't care what may or may not be connected. I can't think of any reason why a (good) converter wouldn't do this.

ADVC-300 works the same way, you can control all functions by switches on the unit. However some of the better HD/DVD recorders do have TBCs so don't spend more than you need to.