video capture

[CompuDude]

I have a Nikon Hi8 camera and will be taking it uw. My question is video capture. I have been looking around and am confused by the options. I have Pinnical has 3 different solutions where the video is sent toa box then convereted into digital. This does seem good because it is less dependent on processor speed. Can anyone offer some suggestions? What are you using?
Thanks
John

If you're working with an old computer, then using an off-board standalone box to convert your analog video feed into a digital stream might be a good idea. It's definitely easier. With a fast machine, it might be cheaper and better quality to do an analog capture and convert and compress it later. It comes down to price and ease of use: The standalone converter box is going to be easiest, but it is not going to extract every last bit of possible detail from your analog source. If this is for fun, that might not matter, so just get the external box and be done with it. There are a lot of them. I've heard decent things about a box Sony makes. I think Plextor actually makes one also.

Frankly, as others have pointed out, your best bet is to shoot digital in the first place. But I'm guessing that is not an option... probably because you already have a housing for your Nikon (and those suckers are expensive!). One option you might consider, however, is to pick up an inexpensive Digital8 video camera. You can't shoot with it in your housing, but you can shoot digital on land (yay!), and it will play back your Hi8 analog tapes and convert them on the fly to the digital format your computer wants to work with. Two things for the price of one! I've seen Digital8 cameras that are cheap enough that it warrants looking into, since you can offset the cost against that of the analog capture gear that will be useless the moment you go digital anyway.

 

[H2O lover]

Thanks for the replies. Buying a miniDV camera is not in the budget right now.
Basically can anyone who has digitized analog video tell me what hardware they used and how well it performed.
thanks

 

[MarkH]

I had (have) a 2 Gig processor with 224 megs RAM (running Windows XP). I used the "WinfastTV2000XP Pro" capture card. It conected to my Sony HI-8 with the S-video cable. My computer handled capturing DVD-quality video (at 29.whatever frames per second) fine. The only problem was that I couldn't capture sound at the same time or it would be too much for my system (started dropping frames). More RAM probably would have solved this.

 

[H2O lover]

Thanks swan

H2O

 

[CompuDude]

Thanks for the replies. Buying a miniDV camera is not in the budget right now.
Basically can anyone who has digitized analog video tell me what hardware they used and how well it performed.
thanks

I've tried a number of solutions over the years, ranging from an Iomega Buzz to some low-end Pinnacle stuff to an older ATI all-in-wonder, and have never had what I considered to be acceptable results with anything other than the several thousand dollar high end editing gear I used to have access to at work. The only thing that gave me what I considered truly acceptable results at home was going fully digital. The second best was running it through my digital camera as a pass-through.

 

[H2O lover]

Lets see if anyone new has an opinion on the video capture hardware they use.

 

[MagnaRyder2]

A few quick notes on what I've found.

1. Running on an AthlonXP +2800, Pinnacle 9 and Pinnacle 10 stuttered and skipped
on the encoded file. Note that this is prior to burning to a DVD -- it is the
file on the hard drive created by Pinnacle.

2. Adobe Elements demands Hyperthreading, which the Athlon CPUs didn't have
prior to the x64. I could not run Adobe Elements on my Athlon machine.

3. The Pinnacle add-in PCI card and break-out box dropped too many frames running
on an Athlon XP +1800.

4. Ditto for the Pinnacle USB box, running on the Athlon.
(I was also having video-audio sync problems with either #3 or #4 but I don't
recall which.)

5. Adobe Elements forces a reboot on my laptop, running an Intel Duo Core proc.

What I have found to work for me is firewire. I'm shooting with a Canon DV
camera. I also use the camera as an A/D converter to pass through Hi8, VCR,
and off-air video.
As for software, I have Pinnacle 9.4 and Adobe Premiere Elements on my
video machine, powered by an Intel P4 CPU. They both work well.

 

[diversteve]

I haven't used my analog gear in a couple of years, but here's what worked for me:

Pinnacle Studio seemed to get much more reliable with the 9.4 release. I used it with their AV/DV PCI capture card. Still had the occasional lockup when doing a long render, so I found it more convenient to break my video into shorter segments before burning the DVD. I didn't run it on a particularly fast P4 so sometimes my rendering would take hours, shorter clips meant less to re-do when (not if...) it crashed.

I would not use any of the 3 USB options you referenced in your previous posting. Mostly because USB occasionally polls devices on the chain which could interfere with capture. Also if you have a USB keyboard/mouse etc. they're sharing the channel simultaneously when used.

The best way I found to get acceptable captures was to turn off all USB devices, disable any resident Virus s/w or Anti-Spyware, shutdown my DSL connection completely and stop any resident processes that I didn't need running, things like PalmSync or iTunes etc. There's a utility referenced somewhere on DigitalDiver.net in one of the video postings that does this if you're unsure of what to shut down in XP.

Even with all this, I found it best to capture in about 3-5 minute segments. In Studio, pressing the spacebar during capture starts a new clip. I also had better results on the DVD creation side when I created DVD's using shorter clips with simple menus.

I've still got the AV/DV card if you want it - PM if interested

 

[KiiY]

Years ago I used a Pinnacle DC10 Plus to edit analog video and it worked quite well. From a Hi8 source, you could capture via the S-Video input of the supplied capture card and get results that held up pretty well through editing and output back to S-VHS or regular VHS.

I used this on an old AMD K6 400MHz machine with old 17GB hard drives which were considered high capacity at the time... No problems.

The DC10 plus seems to go for about $10 on eBay these days. Maybe worth a look?

 

[JeffG]

Thanks for the replies. Buying a miniDV camera is not in the budget right now.
Basically can anyone who has digitized analog video tell me what hardware they used and how well it performed.
thanks

I used an ATI All in Wonder 7500 card. It did a very crappy job when there was motion in the scene.

I re-did the tape going using my miniDV camera as the converter and the video looked great.

Maybe you could borrow a buddies miniDV camera.