Toronto equipment rental for DV capture

AtomicGreymon wrote on 11/19/2007, 8:44 PM

My grandparents recently gave me about 6 or 7 old VHS tapes that are old home movies, along with a few old camcorder tapes of stuff that never got transferred (along with the camcorder).

Now, I was hoping to get it into Vegas to edit first, however I don't have anything that would enable me to capture them to DV. The only way I could get it into the computer at the moment is play the tapes through my DVD recorder and rip those DVDs onto my PC. However I'd rather avoid having to work with MPEG-2, if possible.

Anyway, on to the main point of my post here...

I've tried searching around the internet for a store in the Toronto area I might be able to rent a piece of equipment like the Canopus ADVC-110 or some similar firewire-interface that would allow me to capture to DV... ideally just for a weekend, hopefully not costing more than $40-60. I'm hoping there are some Ontarians here that may know of some place that would have this kind of equipment for rental.

thanks for any input.

Comments

Tom Pauncz wrote on 11/19/2007, 10:08 PM

Hi,
Since you choose to hide your name and don't sign your post, I have no idea what to call you. :-)

I have an ADVC-100 and we could talk. I really don't think you're likely to find one for rent.

Email me via this forum.
Tom

AtomicGreymon wrote on 11/21/2007, 12:23 PM

Thanks for letting me know about those settings; wasn't aware of it.

Thanks for the offer, and I think you're right... it doesn't seem likely there's a place around that rents something like that out. Though I found a store in Vancouver that has the 110, for the little good it does me in Toronto, lol.

I may've found an alternative solution for transerring them in, but I'll definately give you a shout if it doesn't look like that's going to work out.

Apparently, one of the libraries at my university has some video equipment that can be signed out, and among the hardware are some Sony DCR-TRV-900 miniDV camcorders. I looked the camera up, and apparently it has a video input for recording from a VCR, or other analog source. From there, I could just dump it into my computer like a regular miniDV tape.

Before trying that out, though, I was just wondering if there's any disadvantage to this route compared to using something like the ADVC-100. Would the quality be degraded at all by using this kind of two-step process?

Tom Pauncz wrote on 11/21/2007, 12:56 PM

Hello Andrew, :-)
You could use the TRV-900 to do the analog-digital conversion. In fact I did something similar to that to convert some older 8mm analog video tapes to digital.

FWIW, it's the source quality that will, in large part, control the quality you end up with. My preference would be the ADVC box as you can capture directly to the computer, but you could accomplish what you want using the SONY camera.

Cheers,
Tom