dc10plus or DV500plus/DVD-no dropped frames/bad audio synch

[jewel]

The objective is to digitise standard VHS tapes of star trek, X-Files etc - and output SVCD for CD buringing in shortest time. There are hundreads of tapes.

I can purchase the DC10plus for $100 and obtain a copy of media pro or pay $400. Or $100 for Dazzle DV Master

Time is an issue as is quality of capture and audio synch problems. Which card will provide best audio synch and speed of encoding. Bear in mind that I will upgrade to DVD version of DV500plus for faster mpeg encoding

Can anyone advise?

[wumbus]

I can only comment on the DC10plus solution because I haven't tried the others. My setup includes: Win98SE, DC10plus, AVI_IO. I capture from my SVHS vcr via a svideo cable at 30fps, 2fields 640x480, 6000kpbs. I then load the segmented AVI file into Virtualdub and edit out the commcerials (using stream copy so I don't need to re-encode)... this step takes about 15 mins. I then frameserve using AVISynth (separate fields before resize to 480x480 and then weave to preserve interlacing) to Cinemacraft's CCE2.50 encoder (3 pass VBR mpeg-2) (about 8 hours encode time per hour of video on my P3-700). Then, I use VCDEasy to create the SVCD compliant .bin/.cue files and burn with Nero. The resulting NTSC video is pretty good when played on my TV, but the colors do definitely loose some vibrancy. Can't beat this setup for the $$. I bought my DC10plus for $22 at Office Depot during a clearout, so this was a bargain.

One possbility that I haven't been able to test is to use the new Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 (MSRP $149) to create MPEG-2/SVCDs. If some of the early reports are correct, you can burn the mpeg-2 video without re-encoding. If this is true, then you could use a merge-cut editor like Womble's MPEG2VCR to cut out the commercials and burn the video without re-encoding... this would be amazing if true. (some say you can already do this with the Dazzle DVC II, but I've stayed away because of the audio sync issues.

One more budget solution is to purchase a Canopus ADVC-50 convertor ($199) and capture DV at 720x480 and convert to MPEG-2/SVCD. Haven't tried this, so I don't know how it'll look.