Pinnacle Studio MovieBox DV

[raffie]

Hi, I am planning on buying a capture card but before I do I'd like to hear from ppl here who may have some suggestions. I'm looking for a high quality card that captures to an editable format (I used to use an MJPEG card). My intention is to capture off live TV, both from analogue and digital sources (however, the digital will have to be capped through an S-video port), to export and archive to either DVD or Xvid/DivX.

I've looked around a little and I am thinking of buying a Pinnacle Studio MovieBox DV version 9.


This card is quite expensive (€250) and so I'd like to hear from ppl who have this card or can suggest an alternative for it that is around the same price range, or possibly cheaper . This card can capture from both analogue or DV input to DV or MPEG. The possibility to cap to MPEG is a nice plus, but not really necessary for me.

Any suggestions are appreciated

[PMorton]

The price you are quoting sounds like the hardware bundled with the Studio software. If you don't need the software, you can probably get just the hardware. Not sure of the conversion rate, but I recently saw the hardware alone on the Pinnacle site for US$120, and the bundled package for US$199.

[adamthole]

I bought a Pinnacle Moviebox a couple years ago, and it put out a high quality image, however when I would use old VHS tapes any time it would hit static it would freeze. Whether this was a problem with the hardware or software, I don't know. I was using Pinnacle Studio software.

[StoneColdWhat]

well I wouldn't pay that much , this was on sale a month or so back for about $60 canadian and from what I've read its not that good.

[The_Doman]

A friend of mine had bought that box (PAL) about 2 years ago.
I played around with it for some weeks but my impressions were not good at all.
Firstly the S-Video input was broken (friend had not used it yet)
It constantly would lockup when converting VHS tapes.
Reading in the dutch usenet groups lot's of people had the same problems with it.
Compared with my Sony DVD8 passthrough function the picture quality of that pinnacle DV box was pretty bad.

Because they call this version 9 it could be they redesigned and improved it.

But this was just my experience with that Pinnacle DV Box.

[edDV]

The Pinnacle Studio MovieBox DV and especially the USB version had many problems when they were introduced a couple of years ago. I don't know if that is still true. All I can recommend is that you carefully survey user opinions on review sites. Google "Pinnacle Studio MovieBox DV Forums Reviews Opinions

Most find the Canopus ADVC line more solid, especially for audio sync. Other DV transcoders are availble from Datavideo and others.

[raffie]

I really appreciate all the responses. It seems that the Moviebox has some trouble with capping from VHS sources, wich is quite a downside, although it's not the primary reason for what I need it for, I would like to be able to digitize my VHS-C tapes I have lying around for about 10 years (I assume these things do have a limited lifetime).

Also, yes the price I quoted is with the software included, for wich I have no need at all since I'm acustomed to using Virtualdub and Premiere. I think I'll have to look for a store where I have the choice to not have the software included.

But I'm really more inclined to go for a Canopus product now, I'll check that out first.