Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Canopus ADVC

Well, looks like my old Hauppauge WinTV capture card gave up and died this week. It still pulls a picture in, but there's a horrid crackling noise on the one channel that I haven't been able to fix. So I'm going to give up on analog capture cards and get what I originally wanted, the Canopus ADVC converter. It takes the analog output from the S-VHS VCR and converts it straight to a DV stream (720x480, roughly 2.5mbps or 13.5GB/hr). Plus, since it converts the audio on the fly at the same time, I don't have to worry about audio drift in my captures.

The only thing I have to figure out now is what software I'll need to be able to do filtering and cropping on the DV stream, prior to handing it off to TMPGEnc for MPEG2 encoding.

I did consider just getting a MPEG2 capture card like the Hauppauge PVR 250, but I still have some older VHS tapes that I need to capture and filter prior to conversion. Plus, the Hauppauge PVR only outputs in MPEG2 so I'd be stuck with CBR encoding.

Moo's video editing tips - Has a handy link to the Canopus DV (decode only) codec download. Since I don't plan on exporting back to DV (my target is MPEG2), I can just use the Canopus codec.

WinDV is a nice little tool for capturing the DV file from the Canopus. I'm still exploring the interface and I don't know exactly what settings to use yet. (It's best to capture as a type2 AVI file.)

At the moment, I'm not even using VirtualDub to do filtering. Instead, I'm relying on the filtering capabilities built into TMPGEnc v3 (even though they're 3x slower then the ones in VDub). Still haven't produced a DVD yet, so I'm not sure whether I'm right or wrong yet.

Labels: VideoCapture

posted by Wuphon's at 1:45 PM