Mostly DVDs and VHS tables currently through composite video and audio-rl only.

For VHS I'd highly recomment the Canopus / Grass Valley ADVC-300. It does cost more, it does work very well, especially with problematic old VHS tapes.

Bob.

If your VHS tapes are non-problematic (requiring no TBC), a cheapo Canon mini-DV camcorder with analog->digital passthrough will do the trick. Use it all the time.

Another good option is a Panasonic set-top VHS / DVD recorder combo. They actually improve the "look" of the VHS material a bit. I'm using this option even more often recently because it is a one-button transfer.

Both work just fine, and you probably can borrow one of either if you'll just ask around a bit.

So Canopus ADVC series is the ONLY recommended type of video capture hardware to use with Vegas Pro 9??? Hard to believe. Any words on the 110? Anything else at all???

Well, you could use the Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro. You can't capture from within Vegas itself, but you can you can use its capture utility and use the files within Vegas. It will capture MJPEG 4:2:2 or fully uncompressed 4:2:2 using either a composite, S-Video, Component or HDMI input.

Capturing 4:2:2 gives much better results than using the 4:1:1 DV of the Canopus ADVC. If you capture 4:1:1 and then make 4:2:0 DVDs from that, then you end up with 4:1:0 color sampled video which has only 12.5% of the original color information left. Starting with 4:2:2 allows you to end up at the DVD maximum of 4:2:0.

The Intensity is a PCI-e card and now has a list price of $199.

It really depends a bit on what you want to do. The Intensity Pro gives you a bunch of input options at a kind of prosumer level. An AJA Xena card could give you SDI input on a more professional level.

At the consumer/prosumer level most people seem to either pass a composite or S-video signal through a camera or through one of the Canopus boxes. The Canopus boxes output DV video and as john points out you don't get great color sampling. But you do get video in DV format and that's easy to work with.

The advantage of the ADVC 300 is that it appears to have some level of Time Base Correction (TBC) which will tend to clean up a video signal a little bit. This is very helpful if you're using VHS sources because they're so awful to start with.

The advantage of the original product you're asking about (if I understand what it does correctly) is that it converts your input to MPEG2 on the fly. I think the idea is that it's supposed to be ready to burn to a DVD immediately. You don't need to capture a DV-AVI, render it to MPEG2 in Vegas, and then burn it to disk in DVDA. Should save you a lot of time as long as you don't try to edit the files. In this sense it's a bit like a set-top DVD recorder.

Rob Mack

I bought Canopus ADVC-110 ... research put is less than the 300 but should work fine. I put in a FireWire card by Texas Instruments. Sony Vegas Pro's capture utiity sees the Microsoft capture device, but I cannot check it therefore the utiity will not capture ... no errors, just doesn't get it. I have Serif MoviePlusX3 which on another PC saw it right away and did a good capture. Pinnacle Studio DV sees the device but it crashed with a memory error on load.

What am I missing?

Intel motherboard ... Core2Duo 2.4 ... 2 GB RAM ... Integrated video and audio ... no firewire on motherboard.

The Canopus is a device that converts an analog signal to a digital one.
This means that device control is NOT possible.
Options - Prefs - General.
De-select the "Enable DV device control" option.
You'll need to start your VHS deck manually and you should then see video in the capture window.
You won't get scene detection either which means one LONG clip which will have to be split up manually.

Mike

It will not work on this computer except with the trial software that came with it ... Edius Neo 2 ... but the sampling rate is way too high.

MoviePlusX3 give back a memory error 0x80004500 consistently. The capture in Vegas just does not see it ... even with the device controls turned off.

The data sheet says it is compatible with Vegas Pro ... specifically. However, it does not see my device. I am using an Adaptec 4300B 3 port Firewire PCI adapter. I wouldn't think, but could that be a problem?

Further ... the device does show up in the capture utility of Vegas but you can't select it. When I unplug it ... it goes away ... plug it back in and it reappears ... but you can't select it.

Are you using the built-in HD capture utility in Vegas or are you using the external SD Capture program named VidCap60.exe? The built in capture won't capture a DV signal; the external one will.

VidCap60

I've used the 110 and currently have the 300 and it works like a charm with all video capture apps. I would try going into device manager and uninstalling the device while connected, then rebooting and letting PNP reinstall it. Use a different firewire port if you have one.

If you use Scenalyzer to capture you can do optical scene detection and break it up into clips.

I've done that, too. I am now rebuilding my PC from scratch and will see what happens.

While you're rebuilding (and presumably reinstalling Windows?) do not install any firewire drivers. Generally speaking the drivers built into Windows are far superior and more troublefree than anything supplied by 3rd parties. If you got a driver disc with your firewire card just toss it in the trash. Maybe break it in half first, then toss it, just to make sure no one is ever tempted to use it.

Good advice. I repartitioned my drive as well ... new install ... and immediately tested with Windows Movie Maker (it did not work either earlier). Capture went perfect. I'm thinking a registry screw up of some type. My firewire card is Adaptec and had no drivers with it. I'm in the middle of formatting the rest of my drive and instaling al the dot net frameworks as well as SP3 for XP. I'll test at major point along the way. Once the core is done I'll install Vegas and test.

Just finished my testing ... and it works perfecty ... My system was just in bad need of rebuiding when I purchased my Canopus 110 capture. Thanks for the great information and advice to all.

Yeah, firewire boards usually pack with some generic drivers that should never be installed -- usually the best drivers are already on your system. Same with a lot of printers, too.

Quite true. Most consumer grade Epson and HP printers come with bundled software that is just a world of hurt. As long as it's not a bleeding edge new in the last 3 months model, use Microsoft's versions instead and you'll be a lot happier. Failing that download the 'corporate' driver bundle from the manufacturer's website. Do not ever install the disc that came with the printer!

With SONY (electronics, not the creative software department) it's their camera software that is atrocious. You'll be far better off just letting the camera become an external USB drive and copying the photos over. Pixela is one of the few pieces of software i consider "user-hostile". HP and Epson's come close.

You'll be far better off just letting the camera become an external USB drive and copying the photos over.

I keep a tiny USB card reader in my camera bag at all times. It's 4x faster transfer than direct USB connections on either of my cameras. Kodak's Easy Share ranks near the top in the "unfriendly takeover" software realm.

Any frame-field-at-a-time based digital capture (which you get when you use a camcorder as a capture device) is actually doing a decent bit of time base correcting as well. It's not going to be as good as a hardcore broadcast quality IW-TBC, but it absolutely is correcting the time base, versus the analog mess you're feeding in.

This is particularly true in many modern devices, simply because most analog capture chips very much do TBC-like functions in order to work well with cheap consumer gear like $19 Chinese VHS decks.

And of course, in the act of digitizing, you only need half the TBC function anyway, since you're not feeding a cleanly clocked signal back out to the world. So, no need for "house sync" input or any of the analog-world stuff.