Having accumulated many hundreds of hours of VHS and Hi8 camcorder footage I am now starting to look into transferring this to CD for improved longevity, some of my very early stuff has already degraded beyond use. This topic looks a bit of a minefield, I need to be able to display the converted footage both on the PC (DVD drive) and TV via DVD player, my present player won’t play VCD or SCVD.

I need an analogue converter and have been looking at the Canopus ADVC-100 and the Pinnacle DC-10, I think the Canopus needs an additional firewire card.

PC is a P111 800 Mhz with a 20GB drive and 128 M RAM, 40x CD-RW.
Another problem is that I do not have any spare PCI slots !

I think the Pinnacle is analogue only in, so won’t be any use if I update to a DV camcorder.

Has anybody done this before, have you any experience of these options, frame size is quoted at 768x576 for the Pinnacle is that big enough, are there other alternatives for sub £200.

Cheers
Allan

If you're going to upgrade your camera anyhow, why not wait and get one that can pass analogue video to your PC. I have a Sony PC120e that does this.

Great idea Jack, but might be a little out of my price range at the moment.

COMPOSITE SIGNAL
To capture a composite signal get a video capture card with a composite input eg. Pinnacle DC range.

DIGITAL SIGNAL
To capture digital signal get a cheap firewire card.

Have a look on the pinnacle website for their range of cards. In fact, I'm sure someone on here could sell you one cheap guv'

All the cards will be compatible with PAL's framesize. They'll handle NTSC too!


[Edited by DazV - 12/31/2002 1:50:46 AM]

What about a USB version? I've got a Pinnacle version that plugs into a USB slot and has RCA inputs.

Not sure of the throughput of USB1 but you need plenty of it to capture full size PAL footage. I'd be wary of USB capture solutions.

USB sounds interesting as I've not got a spare PCI slot for the DC-10, is it any good though, end quality is very important to me.

swan, do you know the model number, is it any good ?

Keep em coming :D thanks all.

No TV at home so I have a Hauppauge (Spelling??) TV card in the PC. A video recorder plugged in in the normal way so video to PC directly. You just need SW to capture the video to disc. The card comes with capture SW but it's not brilliant. Does the job though.

TV card was £30 as it had the remote control missing (!!!) but they're normally about £60 I think.

Cheers

Dave

Thanks Dave that's another option.

Allan,

A Happy New Year to you.

I've a Pany Micro-DV camcorder and a 60min tape recordered in Full DV (720x576 25fps, 16-bit 48KHz audio) quality to hard disk takes up approx. 15Gb of disk space :eek:

Currently, I capture footage to my PC, edit it using Pinnacle Studio 7 and send it directly back to a new tape in my DV camera. Like you I don't want to lose the quality, so the only thing close to being able to hold soo much info is DVD, but even then you'll have to compress it somehow.

If you want to do something similar to convert from analogue, then you'll need a much bigger disk drive to start with.

Stefan

Sorry Allan, can't remember the model number offhand. Quality is fine to me, s/w that comes with it is pretty basic but does the job.

I just bought a Phillips R890 DVD player and writer. Needed a DVD player anyway and now I have one it also converts all my Hi8 camcorder tapes into pucka mpeg files, quickly and simply. Plus allows easy insertion of chapters etc.

Got mine for GBP375 excl. VAT

Taff

OK thanks swan.

And a happy new year to you Ozzy, I had been wondering about the hard drive capacity, I knew this wasn't going to be easy or cheap :D

Allan

Taff, another great idea.
I need a new DVD player anyway, this sounds viable.

Cheers
Allan

Taff,
How do get on with editing your Hi8 footage on the R890, can you stop and start the recording process, or do you load up so much footage select which scenes you want and then hit record.

Cheers

Editing done on the camera which then plays for a "one off recording" session. R890 allows you to insert chapters etc and obviously you can have more than one title on a disk subject to size.

You can choose the qulaity of the recording as well.

I haven't tried yet but I'm assuming I can edit the film more on my PC once its cut to the DVD.

Thanks Taff, I'm going to look into this DVD recorder option.