Canopus ADVC-50 yes or no?

[dezine]

I have a question in regards to AV only capture cards.
I currently have a new system that is already Firewire ready but doesn't have an AV Capture card, so I have been using an external converter box (Dazzle DV Bridge) that works alright, but has problems from time to time with dropped frames.
I was looking into obtaining an internal AV Capture card to be a bit more stable and reliable to capture AV video from my VCR.

I was looking into installing an analog capture card like the Canopus ADVC-50 since I already have a Firewire fully functioning card with 4 pin and 6 pin connections.
I currently use Media Studio Pro 6.5, Video Studio 6.0 and DVD Workshop 1.2. I also have Adobe Premeire but prefer the Ulead products instead and was wondering if the Canopus cards are comaptible with Ulead products.

I have a Pentuim 4 1.6 Ghz processor, 60GB internal/120GB external Firewire 7200 RPM HD, GeForce 2 Ti 64mb video card, ASUS-42302e31 Award Medallion BIOS v6.0 Award Plug and Play BIOS Extension, and 512 mb DDR Ram.

Thanks for the advice,
Michael (Dezine)

[VideoMann]

I use the ADVC-100 w/ P4- 2GHz.
I have no dropped frames. I had a hard time getting WindowsXP to load a generic driver for it, but eventually I did. Quality is very good. I don't know how it compares with Dazzle. I never get dropped frames or out of sync audio, so it is very good. It only captures analog to DV-AVI, so if you want MPEg1 or 2 you need to use Software. There are now 3 ADVC products so choose what makes sense to you. If your present firewire card is OHCI compliant you are in pretty good shape. Some early firewire cards were OHCI compliant but had a chip component from Texas Instrument that caused troubled with various capture cards including the ADVC products.

I have never experienced this and I use a firewire card that was bottom cheap. The ADVC-1394 comes with a build-in firewire port at very reasonable price if you don't trust your own.

Video Capture cards from Pinnacle and Matrox are too expensive for most consumers and come with many platform incompatibilities. All Canopus products are quite stable with a wide variety of computer systems. If I had to buy another video component I would buy the Canopus MVR1000 with analog-S-Video to MPEG2 hardware encoder, but I'm very happy with the ADVC.