Video Capture - any comments?

[shedsounds]

Have been looking at the various adaptec videoh pci cards and usb2.0 boxes but then noticed the DVD Ezmaker pci card by Avermedia. Comes in at £40 which seems reasonable. Wanting to convert analogue camcorder stuff to mpeg and / or mpeg 2. Any one any experience of this or comments / recommendations?

[sniper]

i have just done my first dvd from analogue camcorder , i used the pinnacle studio 8 dc10plus , £70 from pcworld for board and software , dead easy to use , haven't seen results from any other cards/software so can't compare but i'd recommend what i got , you'll also need a big HD and a dvd writer if you want good quality , i put my first attempt on vcd and basically it was crap. there was a post in the last few days where someone put an address up for a card for about £20 ...... but compare quality / screen sizes etc not just price

[shedsounds]

Thanks for that, not seen that one, not a problem with hd and got dvd, just some stuff for archive will want to put to vcd but decent stuff to go to dvd. Anyone got anything else to add?

[Pegasus]

I've been doing video capture/encoding for quite some time now, so I think it's fair to say I have a reasonable amount of experience.

I tried all manner of PCI based cards, etc and I thought the finished results on all of them were crap.

I ended up purchasing a Canopus ADVC-100 external analogue to digital video convertor, costing £269.

The conversion from analogue to digital is faultless, it has nifty little features like the ability to "lock" the audio to the video so it is absolutely impossible to get sync problems and it handles NTSC as well as PAL without any issues at all.

Because all the conversion is being carried out by the actual Canopus, this means there is zero load on your CPU (unlike USB & PCI devices) so you can create digital movies on even the lowliest spec PC or indeed have your PC doing a bit of MPEG encoding while you capture a movie.

Used in conjuntion with TMPGEnc, I can capture analogue footage, encode it to MPEG1 (VCD) and I guarantee that you will be very hard pushed to tell the difference between the finished VCD and a pre-recorded VHS tape when viewing it.

I haven't bothered to master a DVD from any footage that I have captured yet as I simply can't see the point (my VCD's come out perfect and you have to remember that the footage is coming from an analogue source to start with).

Buy one, you won't regret it.

That's my tuppence worth


P.S

If £269 is a bit out of your price range, then you can have it's little brother (the ADVC-50) for about £175.

The only difference between the two is that the ADVC-50 does not have analogue outputs (although if all you are doing is capturing to PC then you won't need them anyway).