[MacDV] Re: vhs conversion

[sb]

Buy a converter box for $175 and a big external firewire hard drive and
you'll be good to go.

Other World Computing usually has reasonable prices on external firewire
drives. You can also check prices at DealMac.com or DealsOnTheWeb.com

Make sure the drive is Firewire (not USB).

You'll need approximately 100GB for each tape, so I would get a 160GB Hard
drive to leave some room for the DVD (it will require 25gb before it
encodes). 
You can do the editing with iMovie and the DVD burning with iDVD.

If you have a new dual-layer DVD burner, you can fit more on it, otherwise,
you'll get just a smidgen less than 2 hours per DVD, which, if you delete
the commercials, will easily allow you to put two episodes on each disc.

Once you have the converter box, you can set up your Mac to capture the TV
show directly onto the hard drive with iMovie in real time. Makes it much
easier/faster to archive those favs!

 regards,

 sb


On 5/26/05 4:17 PM, "Richard Meyeroff" <rem at meyeroff-c-c.com> wrote:

> I am going to be converting 4-6-8 hour VHS tape taped from the TV.
> What I want to do is convert the tape to DV delete the shows we no
> longer want and then burn them to DVD.
> 
> 
>> The DataVideo tec works on Macs, as do virtually all the converter boxes.
>> They just take an analog signal and convert it to dv via firewire which Macs
>> have had as a standard for about 7 years.
>> 
>> Many PC's still don't come with built in firewire.
>> 
>> I have used 4 different manufacturers converter boxes quite a bit. (Sony,
>> ADS, DataVideoTek, Canopus). All work well. I have heard the Miglia also
>> works well.
>> 
>> I have used some other boxes that I didn't like, Formac Studio being the
>> worst, in my experience, YMMV.
>> 
>> The audio doesn't go out of sync on any of them. (captures of an hour or
>> more)
>> 
>> Unless the camera was set to 32khz/12 bit audio, or you are capturing across
>> a lot of timecode breaks.
>> 
>> Locked Audio is a feature of the DVCam spec. It locks the audio to each
>> frame. The normal dv spec allows the audio to drift within 1 sec (30 frames)
>> before relocking, but in really it only drifts a frame or two.
>> If it drifted a whole second, then the audio would just stop and restart at
>> the beginning of the next second. Which I've never heard happen.
>> 
>> Loss of audio sync on long captures is virtually always either 32khz audio
>> or many tc breaks, neither of which is addressed by Canopus' Locked Audio
>> "feature".
>> 
>>  regards,
>> 
>>  sb
>> 
>> 
>> On 5/26/05 12:44 PM, "Nick Scalise" <nickscalise at mac.com> wrote:
>> 
>>>  On Thursday, May 26, 2005, at 11:52AM, Patty Winter
>>> <patty1 at sonic.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>>>  Jamie already answered the question about disk space, so I'll just
>>>>  put in another recommendation for the Canopus A/D converter. I have
>>>>  an ADVC-100 as well, and it works great.
>>> 
>>>  One more vote for the ADVC-100 from me.
>>> 
>>>  Also, the ADVC-100 will defeat Macrovision'ed tapes too. I do not
>>> know if this
>>>  functionality has survived through to the ADVC-110. Helped me transfer some
>>>  movies to DVD that would not play on the living room vcr, happy kids now...
>>> 
>>>  Thirdly, Canopus advertises Audio Sync Lock, said to keep audio in sync
>>> over
>>>  longer captures.
>>> 
>>>  Q: Has anyone that is *not* using a Canopus unit ever experienced
>>> their audio
>>>  going out of sync on longer analog captures? Just curious if
>>> Canopus actually
>>>  has an advantage or not.
>>>