How's Your ADVC-100 Analog Stability?

[btieleman]

Canopus support was very helpful, and the video quality seemed excellent, but I've unfortunately had to return my ADVC-300; unable to get it to stay in analog input mode while capturing Hi8 tapes including rough scene transitions (see my other post - Unwanted Analog/Digital Mode Toggling on ADVC-300).

The Canopus tech suggested black striping (too late, my fifty 120 min. tapes are already recorded) and/or disabling device control on my capture software (didn't help), so I've very reluctantly had to give up after days of researching and trying everything.

The Canopus tech suggested that the ADVC-100 "might" be more stable in this regard. I really wanted the 300's image enhancement capabilities, but would settle for the 100 *if* I was reasonably confident that I wouldn't have the same problem.

The ADVC-100 has a DIP switch option for manual input select mode (whereas the 300 has no such option, apparently designed for auto only). I'm wondering if you can comment on your experiences with *your* ADVC-100. Does yours STAY in ANALOG input mode for you, regardless of rough tape scene transitions, glitches, or momentarily dropped signal?

Your insight and experience would be very helpful to me, and very much appreciated.

Thanks very much for your time and consideration.

Bill T.

[Perro Grande]

Bill T:

Sorry you've had rough luck with your ADVC-300. I always find such problems frustrating.

I have an ADVC-100 and can offer you my observations on it:

I always have it set to the manual select mode. It has NEVER toggled to digital based on the input signal quality or the lack of an input signal. I don't think heaven or hell could move it out of its position when the DIP switch is in manual mode.

It will happily capture stuff, seemingly indifferent to the input signal I've given it. Of course, garbage in = garbage captured, but it has never flopped input modes.

I have not seen the quality of the 30, so I can't comment on what you might be losing dropping down to the ADVC 100.

With my 100 doing the capturing and TMPG doing the transcoding to MPEG2, I've been able to produce results that are outstanding from a variety of sources -- including analog tape.

I'd buy the ADVC100 again in a heartbeat.

Just my $.02 -- hope you find this helpful.

[redwudz]

Another happy ADVC-100 user. Same as Perro Grande, never changed from analog. I have ran some crappy VHS long play tapes with the box and no problems to date. Presently working with Mainconcept for quick MPG conversion in real time.

[rcb]

Same here.

[rezonat0r]

Interesting. I have been using my new ADVC-300 extensively in the past week or two, and transfered several Hi8 tapes. They were all around 10 years old, but only one of them had really serious dropouts.

We're talking BIG dropouts here, too... lots of basically "black" areas where there should be video, during some parts you can see tape noise along the bottom and the audio is completely gone, but this doesn't happen all too often. I had tried capturing this same tape with my DAC-100 (like the ADVC-100, I believe) and it always dropped a TON of frames during these areas. It appeared that if there was one "bad" frame, it would take the DAC-100 about 29 more frames to lock on again. Obviously this didn't work too well.

With the ADVC-300, for me at least, these problems are essentially gone. It seems to me like the only time I drop a frame is when there is basically no video data at all, when it looks like snow or junk. This works out 'cause I would really rather not have these frames anyway, I'm sure they're a nightmare for any MPEG2 encoder. But if there is a dropped frame, the ADVC-300 immediately locks on afterwards. And it captured the part where the audio was completely gone, and the tape was clearly damaged, with no dropped frames at all.

I find that I need to run the Controller 300 once after I power on to set it to Analog input mode, but I've never seen it switch out no matter what I throw at it. Out of curiosity, did you try keeping the Controller open the whole time while you captured?

I hate to see you give up the 300, in my experience with both my Hi8 and VHS tapes the 3D nosie reduction and comb filter makes quite a difference. I'm using Procoder Express to go to MPEG2 for DVD, and MPEG2 encoders love wasting bits on noise. So far my output has consistently looked better than the original even in MPEG2 form.

Anyhow, to others thinking about a 300, I'd highly recommend it myself.

[btieleman]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Just to clarify, my problem wasn't dropped frames, but rather the unit would toggle by itself into digital input mode, thus abruptly halting DV output to my capture software (Scenalyzer 2.1). I'd have to manually put the unit back into analog mode, but by that time a good bit of material had gone by. This effectively made it impossible to do clean, lengthy captures, and occurred throughout all of the tapes I tested.

The Canopus tech indicated that the unit was performing as designed, i.e. if the analog input goes away (even for a moment) the unit goes to look at the digital input. If there's nothing there, it apparently assumes the fun is over and sits idly by. The short of it...it seemed like a great box, but I wouldn't be able to capture my voluminous tape library without a huge amount of trouble.

As an aside, the folks at videoguys.com were also very helpful, professional, and true to their 30-day guarantee to get my ADVC-300 working for me, or my money back. When I decide to try the ADVC-100, or anything else, I will go with them. I am not giving up!

Thanks again.

Bill

[Redd]

Another happy ADVC-100 user. Again...analog only and set to manual only. All my DV captures are direct firewire from cam to pc.

[solarfox]

he Canopus tech indicated that the unit was performing as designed, i.e. if the analog input goes away (even for a moment) the unit goes to look at the digital input. If there's nothing there, it apparently assumes the fun is over and sits idly by.

Hm... I was considering the purchase of an ADVC-300... but if this is correct, this seems like a major design flaw to me, and probably something we should complain loudly about to Canopus.

Why on earth would they design it like this? I mean, think about it -- who is the most likely to spend the extra $$$ on an ADVC300 vs. the 100? People who need the built-in timebase corrector and noise-reduction. Why would you need these features? Well, primarily, for transferring old and marginal-quality tapes.

Now -- what kinds of analog source material is most likely to have the analog signal disappear for a moment, particularly at points where the tape was stopped and started? Why, those same old and marginal-quality analog tapes, of course...

[rezonat0r]

This is excatly why I replied, to say that this problem does not occur for me with my ADVC-300. For them to say that this is "normal behavior" is not correct. I have spoken with several Canopus techs and they vary widely in knowledge.

I have had my ADVC-300 capturing/previewing while I unplug video cables and switch from VCR to camcorder, stop tapes, eject tapes, fast forward tapes, play shitty tapes with lots of dropouts. Never once did it switch out of analog capture mode. In fact, it even captures everything as I fast forward with the VCR.

You never said if you had tried leaving the Controller window open while you captured. The controller seems to force mine into analog mode, even when the "input select" switch does nothing.

Its possible something else in your chain was causing the problem. So many variables, so little time. Anyhow, sorry to see you have this problem, but its certainly not what a normal ADVC-300 should do. After seeing the difference I'll never go back.

[btieleman]

Thanks again for all your input. I'm at a bit of a disadvantage here, because I'm very new to all this. The tech I spoke with at Canopus name was David (3/8 @ 1950 EST). I had not recevied a response to my web/email request for tech support (still haven't), so I tried calling. The guy seemed quite helpful and knowledgable (to a newbie anyway). The vendor (videoguys.com) drew a blank and told me to call Canopus, and I could find/solicit no insight on various internet forums and usenet. Thus, I had to take the Canopus tech at his word.

I tried both S-video and composite input cables between the ADVC and my camcorder.
I tried the s-video cable without the composite audio cables (though admittedly not intentionally <sheepish grin>).
I tried various flavors of 1394 cables (4-6, 6-6, 6-9 pin via front or back ADVC DV ports).
I tried different tapes.
I tried without a DV output cable connected to the ADVC.
I tried with/without the control window open (though admittedly not intentionally).
I tried futzing with my capture software settings (not thinking it would matter, though wanted to exhaust all avenues).
I tried different capture software (ditto).
I tried different, though clearly unrelated, ADVC-300 dip switch settings(ditto).

The box would always gag and toggle, halting my capture, in the same places on the tape -- whenever there was a nasty transition (i.e. from powering the camcorder down during recording, instead of pressing the record button to gracefully stop recording).

Do you think that I simply had a bad box? Now I'm thinking maybe, based upon ADVC-300 success comment above. Unfortunately, not many people seem to have, or are prepared to comment, about the 300 yet.

Gee, would anyone happen to be tight with a Canopus resource from whom you could get a defefinitive answer? I'd love to tough it out and try again, but it'd be a crapshoot after what the Canopus tech told me, and could get expensive shipping these boxes back and forth to videoguys, and/or calling Canopus from NJ. I already spent a good bit of coin upgrading my PC for this endeavor.

I suspect that this is just the steep and costly -- though I still feel worthwhile -- "nonlinear" learning curve. I will persevere!

Thanks again for your help and insight.

Bill T.

[rezonat0r]

Hey again Bill.

You definitely tried alot of things, but one thing I think you didn't try was a different playback unit for your Hi8 tapes.

For my Hi8 collection I am using a Sony camcorder that is very close to the same model of the camera that recorded these old tapes. I wonder if your playback unit is possibly sending an unexpected signal during instances where there is corruption on the tape. It seems like, with analog stuff, all bets are off when the signal is totally out of whack.

It would be interesting to see if a decent Hi8 deck (one designed for editing) gave you better results. Obviously you don't have the ADVC-300 anymore, but if you are serious about obtaining near-ultimate quality for your analog dubs, you may want to reconsider.

Here's a question for you: In your experience with the 300, did you ever notice a slight color "smearing" with hotter colors when capturing? For instance, if there was a spot of red that moved quickly around the screen, it would leave a faint trail across the next 2-3 frames? I'm wondering if this is an anomally of older tapes, an artifact of the conversion to DV and its colorspace, or a combination of both... I may give Canopus a call about this one. Anyone else noticed this with the ADVC-100 or something else?

Good luck,

-Brandon

Edit: Just had another thought. Are you sure that your capture software was set to ignore dropped frames? Scenalyzer has an option to abort on dropped frames. The ADVC-300 also sometimes reports a "dropped frame" when the frame is damaged. You said you tried other capture programs but didn't say which one (I'm assuming you tried DV-IO ?)

[btieleman]

The alternate capture software I tried was WinDV and, as expected, the results were the same. I did set Scenalyzer to ignore dropped frames, just to test, but as I anticipated to no avail. Again, I was facing a "no output" problem (beause of the toggle) rather than a "bad output" problem. The ADVC 300 simply wouldn't remain in analog mode. By the time my analog input signal had stabilized (literally a second later), the unit had already toggled into and stuck with digital mode. Thus, end of capture (ADVC looking in the wrong place for input = no ADVC output). I'd have to babysit every minute of every (40-50) 2 hour tape capture, and stop/recue/restart every scene of every glitchy transition.

What I was able to capture truly looked exceptional (to this newbie's eye). No distortion, jaggies, or peculiarities of any kind. The color was rich and clean with no smearing or streaks that you mention. Thus my pain in sending this otherwise sweet piece of gear back.

I did finally hear back from Canopus in writing, to wit...

<quote> By design the ADVC-300 will stop sending a digital signal once it stops receiving an analog signal. No matter how slight the interruption is on the tape the ADVC-300 is sensitive enough to stop the signal it sends out. At this time the editing program will stop its capture.

Try setting dip switch number 8 to off. This will force the device to be driven from hardware. Your ADVC-300 will most likely stop switching to digital however it still should stop capture during those "rough" transitions. It is best to stripe (record black) over your blank tapes before recording to them. This will decrease the chance for a non-signal to be read by the ADVC. <end quote>

As an aside, I did try both settings on switch 8 (Operation Mode setting
Allows you to select the control method of ADVC-300. OFF: UNIT ON: PC), neither of which stopped it from switching to digital mode.

I'm waiting/hoping on confirmation from Canopus' Tech Support Manager and/or Senior Marketing Engineer, but I'm thinking now that neither the 300 nor the 100 will turn the trick smoothly for me. The tech I spoke to indicated that "one other customer" has reported the same problem, but it just seems kind of oblivious -- considering the nature of analog signal sources -- for the box to have been designed this way. Apparently I have much to learn.

I'll let you know if/what I hear back, and what happens if i go with the 100. Thanks again for all your time and input.

Bill T.

[rezonat0r]

Hey again, well I'm not familiar with WinDV, but when problems arise, DV-IO is the best tool to use for capturing. Once you tell it to capture, it just sits and writes the good frames until you tell it to stop. I'm not sure we can rule out a software issue... Also, dunno if you can remember, but what were your plethora of dip switches like on the bottom of the unit? Mine are all set left, except for #5, which is for the 7.5 IRE standard here in the US..

But What about your Hi8 playback device? If it has been a common thread throughout all your trials and tribulations (and I've been there, believe me), I'd highly recommend removing it as a variable. At the very least, buy a $250 Sony Hi8 camcorder from your local rental electronics store and see what happens.

I did just that a while back when I had a really damaged Hi8 tape, I wanted to see if a different playback device might read the tape better. As it turned out they both produced nearly identical results, so the tape was just gone in parts. Nevertheless, I can say for sure that recent model cheap Sony camcorders work flawlessly with my ADVC-300 unit, and a tape with lots of total signal dropouts. FWIW!

[btieleman]

I'll certainly keep DV-IO in mind (thanks for the tip), but I am reasonably confident that this is solely a hardware issue. The ADVC-300 toggled to digital mode regardless of whether it was connected to the firewire port or not -- i.e. no input (looking in the wrong place) = no output to the DV port. Thus, nothing for the software to capture, so I can't lay blame there.

I am continuing to pursue this vigorously with Canopus, and they have been admirably forthcoming and helpful thus far. I also plan to travel to the Videoguys (I live about 1.5 hours away) and, having discussed it with their customer support, work with them to test/verify the 300 and 100 with my gear, and ideally theirs (including an alternate Hi8 source/deck with my tape).

Can you tell I really want to get a 300 working?

In answer to your question, I did mimic the settings you describe, as well as many other combos, to no avail.

Thanks again for the continued feedback. Stay tuned.

Bill T.