I have seen a lot of comments about external capture devices -- USB-connected to the PC. Most of the comments have been rather negative, because of either bandwidth or flow control problems. Are there really any external USB-connected capture devices that work well -- just want to do a high quality capture of analog VHS home movies to DVD (can go to hard drive first and then to DVD later, if that is the best way to do it). Are there any external capture devices that have firewire connections to the PC -- it seems that this would correct most of the problems I have seen.
Yes some of the Best Professinal Level capture devices use a Firewire interface Like the "Canopus ADVC-100/300/500" Line of Analogue Digital converters which are very good capture devices that use Hardware DV Compression.... OF USB devices the only ones worth Trying are the ones that use Hardware Compression so if you Must get a USB Capture device make sure it uses Hardware Compression over Software Compression..... Cheers
Minion - yes, I read a bunch (and there are a bunch, 171 to be exact, and most 10 out of 10) of comments about the Canopus 100 on the VideoHelp site. (By the way, after seeing the comments, I went to the Canopus site to find out more -- and I find that they no longer offer the Canopus 100, it has been replaced with the Canopus 110). I had a couple of questions about the Canopus card: 1. It appears that no software comes with it -- so is there software on the Windows XP system that I can use, or does it interface to most video editing programs (such as MS Movie Maker 2). What should I be using here. 2. What kind of format options can you get coming out of the Canopus device -- are there choices there. I don't mind spending a reasonable amount of money for good stuff -- it just isn't worth it to me to have to mess with work-arounds or to constantly worry if it's going to work right. Thanks. 3.
The Canopus -110 is a Plug and Play Device so there are no Drivers needed to use the Device and any DV Capture Program will work with the device Like "WinDV" or "DVIO" Both of which are freeware and you can also use Windows Movie Maker to Capture Video from the Canopus Device but I wouldn"t recomend useing it for editing because it Mainly works in the WMV Format which is not the Right Format for DVD.... The Canopus Device Captures Video from Both Pal and NTSC Video Sources and Compressed the Raw Video Signal to High Quality DV AVI Files (the Same Format used in Digital Camcorders and even Some Newer movies are Shot in this Format) in Full D1 Resolution (720x480 NTSC or 720x576 Pal) and I believe it also supports 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios...The DV AVI format is also the Best format for editing as it can be rendered multiple Times without much Quality Loss but will still have to Convert your DV AVI files to Mpeg-2/DVD format before you author the Movie to DVD which shouldn"t take too long if you have a fast encoder and pc..... The Canopus Device are Considered the some of the best Quality capture devices for the Money and are even used in some Studios for Converting Analogue Video to Digital and there is also a way of Disableing the Macrovision detection so you will be able to Capture Retail VHS Tapes to your PC without worrying about Copy protection Problems..... They also make the "Canopus ADVC-300 and ADVC-500" which come with Built in Hardware Noise Reduction filters and other Hardware Filters to help Clean up Noisy Analogue Video but they are also considerably more Expensive and use the Same Hardware Compression Chip that the ADVC-110 uses.... The ADVC-110 also has an audio Lock feature which eliminates the Chance of any Audio video Sync problems which can be a Big problem with Most analogue Capture devices..... They also Make a Device that is allmost the Same as the ADVC-110 but it is an Internal PCI Card and it is Called the "Canopus ACEDVio" which uses the Save Compression Chip as the ADVC Devices and has most all of the Same Features accept it is Internal and it is also a Bit Cheaper than the ADVC-110 as I have seen them on E-Bay for as Low as $175 US...... Well I hope this answers most of your Questions.... Cheers
Boy, I hate this -- having to re-type this whole post (last one lost when I clicked post -- must have overflowed something). Minion, thanks for all your help, in particular: I might not have mentioned it in this thread, that I am setting this up for my father-in-law -- I don't even have a camcorder -- and I didn't know that they the file format they produced was .AVI (I have heard of that). So the Canopus device will take the .avi file, hardware compress it, and somehow get it copied onto the hard drive. Does it get copied/compressed frame-for-frame, which would mean to me that "all" of the data on the VHS tape is now on the hard drivem which probably means the quality on the hard drive is equal to the quality on the VHS tape. So what I have now is the video, in .avi format on the hard drive. Do I now need a Canopus codec to read that file. I haven't figured out all of this codec stuff yet -- but I get it impression that these codecs can just be passed around and specified and installed and used by the various software programs -- and that the key to having everything work right is to have the right codec in the right place at the right time. I don't know how to control them yet, but it seems to be something I need to learn. And you mentioned that the files are supposed to be in MPEG format before authoring -- didn't know that either, but it makes sense. So authoring just takes MPEG-1/2 files and manipulates and moves them around. Do authoring typically do anything to the MPEG files (like edit them) or do they must move them around. And then, after everything is arranged, the whole set up is burned to DVD. Do the authoring programs typically burn the end product to disc, or do you need another pass from a burner for that process. One last thing you mentioned is rendering -- I think that is the process of taking a video edited project and writing it out to the hard drive in a single file, in some format. This file is then used as input to some smart burning program which will convert the file to MPEG and burn it on the disc. Am I pretty close here. And lastly, you mentioned encoding at the end of the paragraph. Exactly where does that fit into the picture. Thanks for all your help. Edit: added paragraph with question about encoding.
Hi, Well I will try to answer your Questions the best I can.... The Canopus Device will Compress the Raw analogue Signal from your VCR to DV AVI format and save it on your Hard Drive so if you Started to Capture at the Beginning of the VHS tape and stopped the Capture at the end of the Tape then the whole Tape will be saved on your HD as a DV AVI file...The Quality will be Very Close to the Original VHS Tape...Anytime you Convert an analoguie Signal to digital and Compress it there will be some Loss of Quality which is Totally unavoidable...... Now that you have the DV AVI file saved to your Hard Drive (It will be Fairly big so you should have a Big second Hard Drive just for Captureing and Storeing Video Files, The File will be about 4gb per 20 minutes of Video) you just need to have any DV Codec installed on your System to read the DV AVI file..... Now to Put the AVI file on to DVD it first has to be Encoded to a DVD Compliant Mpeg-2 file useing a Good Quality mpeg encoder Like "Tmpgenc" or the "MainConcept encoder" and after the File has been encoder to Mpeg-2 you use a DVD authoring program which will allow you to add Chapters and Menu"s and Scene selections to your DVD and then it will Format the Mpeg-2 file and your Menu"s and Chapters ect into a "Video_TS" folder which it will then Burn to DVD for you OR you can Burn the "Video_TS" folder to DVD yourself useing something like "Nero" in "DVD Video" Mode..... Most DVD authoring Programs will allow you to do some Very Basic editing Like Mostly just Cutting ....If you need to do more Complex editing you can either edit the File when it is in DV AVI format or you can edit it when it is in Mpeg-2 format but if you do edit in Mpeg-2 format you should use a Native Mpeg editor Like "Womble Mpeg2VCR" or "Womble Mpeg Video Wizard 2005" because other editors will usuially re-encode the File when editing which will degrade the Quality and Take a Bunch of Time were as when useing a Native Mpeg editor there is no quality Loss and the file is rendered in Minutes as Opposed to Hours...... If you do not want menu"s or Chapters you can use a Simple Program Like "VSO DivXToDVD" which will convert your AVI file directly to a "Video_TS" folder which you just have to Burn to DVD but doing it this way doesn"t produce as Good of Quality and there are no Chapters or Menu"s which makes for a Boreing DVD.... Rendering is Basily the act of saveing a Video file that you have edited to your Hard Drive...Rendering usually entails re-encodeing of your File which will degrade the Quality so it is Best to Render the least ammount of Times Possible...So if For instance you were editing your DV AVI file in a Good editing program and were about to save the edited File you would be better off saveing the File as a Mpeg-2 file as opposed to saveing it as a DV AVI file because you would still need to encode the DV AVI to Mpeg-2 but if you were to save the File as Mpeg-2 then you would be saveing Time and quality from not haveing to perform the extra step of saveing to DV AVI and then encodeing to Mpeg-2 when you can just save as Mpeg-2 in the First Place..... So the software you would need to Going from VHS to DVD would be: [bold]DV Capture Software[/bold] (There are some Freeware Programs for this and most High end editing programs have DV Capture Features Built in) [bold]Video editing Software (optional)[/bold] (Most Good Video editing programs are Pretty expensive but they also come with the Capture Software and usually a Built in Mpeg-2 encoder) [bold]Good Quality Mpeg-2 Encoder[/bold] (There are only a small Handfull of Mpeg encoders that I would recomend and they are either "Tmpgenc Pluss/Express" or "MainConcept Encoder" or "Canopus Procoder" or "CinemaCraft Encoder SP") [bold] DVD Authoring Software[/bold] ( I personally recomend useing "MediaChance DVDLab Pro" as it is Fairly easy to learn how to use once you understand the structure of DVD and it has some very professinal features and makes Very nice Looking menu"s) Well I hope this Help you Figure out the Workflow of going from VHS to DVD...There are Probably some easier methods but they will not Produce the same quality and have the DVD Options and Menu features that doing it this way will produce..... Cheers PS: If you ever need any sort of Help and don"t want to have to Post here you can allways PM me and Give me your e-mail address and I will write you back.....
Minion -- thanks a lot -- what a good education -- I hope a lot of newbies, like me, are reading this thread. To follow-up on your response, I see your point about getting the file into an MPEG format as soon as possible to avoid multiple encoding/decoding passes. From your 1st compression comment, I gather the Canapus device/approach will get me just about as close to the original file as I am going to get. You also said that any DV codec would read the AVI file. Does that mean the the AVI file and its compression is based on some "compresson standard". I thought I was seeing comments that indicated that people were using the wrong codec to read these files, which was causing problems like with the quality of the video -- and when you say, any codec, why are there so many -- why isn't there just one. You mention that the video editing step is somewhat optional. Let me use Movie Maker 2 (MM2) as an example, since that is the only video editing program I know anything about, and it seems pretty basic. I put together a video (actually pictures with titles and a sound track). MM2 would accept AVI as source, so I am OK there, but in this case, I was working with JPEG pictures (over 100 of my fther-in-laws 80th birthday party). I added some titles between some of the pictures, put a little text "on" a few of the pictures, and added a few sound tracks. When finished with this, the resulting "project" could be written to a file, in either in AVI format or in .WMV (Windows Media Video) format (at various quality levels, depending on the target device). As long as I don't do another encoding here, the resulting project file should be the same quality as the original AVI file used as source. So if I saved the file, to keep the same quality, I should save it in the native AVI format -- because if I saved it in the WMV format, I would possibly loose some more quality because of encoding to the WMV format. (The example I used above doesn't quite fit this senerio because the pictures were in a JPEG format -- so additional conversions, either to AVI or WMV would be required. However, "if" the pictures were AVI files instead of JPEG files, the above would apply, wouldn't it.) How am I doing so far. OK, I think the above step of converting the MM2 project file to a final AVI or WMV file is the rendering step, which was the process of converting all of the pictures, video, titles, audio into one single file type -- and the process of taking this rendered file and converting it to MPEG and burning it to a DVD just another encoding step. Is that right. I assume that if you want to do complicated video editing, you should stay with the original source, preferably in the original AVI format if possible. But can you do the simple editing I have described above with a good DVD authoring program -- you can't can you -- that's not what DVD authoring programs are for, is it. And lastly, for now -- I think I would want to create a bunch of the above videos, separately, keeping them relatively small -- and convert them all to MPEGs which means I could play them individually. But the cool step would be to combine them all together on a single DVD by adding menus so that you could select which video to play. Is that another rendering step to combine the MPEG and menus together before it can burned again to your final DVD. I have some more questions, but I don't want to turn my response into a book (rather, a bigger book). So let me check to see if I have this pretty much right so far. I think the bottom line, to preserve the quality of the original source (i.e. VHS tape) is to get it into your system in its original AVI format -- but compressed because as big as the compressed files are, the original format on tape would be huge, huge. The objective now would to never encode the AVI file again, except to take it into the final MPEG format. For the original, best quality, you should only do this conversion once, and therefore should work with the files in either AVI format or as you have mentioned use an editor capable of editing MPEG files. (If you stick with the AVI format all the way, the files shouldn't ever get messed with, should they.) OK, am I pretty close on what is happening. Minion, I really appreciate the help you are giving me here -- it has increased my knowledge and understanding immeasurably.
