Pinnacle Studio AV8 vs. Canopus ADVC 50, 100, 1394?

[twen]

Has anyone tried Pinnacle AV8? I'm trying to backup my VHS to VCD (DV8 won't take analog input). I know what Canopus can do from reading through this forum, but what about AV8? Is it worthy to buy if all I want to do is backing up VHS tapes (afterall, the price is more than half of Canopus). How's the quality?

The only down side I've read so far about it is that people having problem using other capturing software on Pinnacle's card, anything else? Any feedback will be appreciated.

[Rick Popko]

Re: AV8.
AV8 captures analog video.
The Canopus box transcodes analog video to a DV signal. If you don't have a FireWire card in your machine, then AV8 is probably the best thing you're going to find out there to let you encode analog video to your PC.-Rick Popko
Pinnacle Systems

[lduggs]

Twen, I have the Pinnacle 8AV. I will have to admit that the Studio 8 software that it comes with very easy to use, and powerful. You can definitely make your VCD's with this. However the Studio 8 software dose crashes every now and then. Just have to make sure you save your work as you go! Even though Pinnacle says it's supports XP, when you do the install you get a warning from Microsoft saying the logo is not registered with Microsoft (not exactly sure what that means!). I can't speak for the Canopus, but whatever you decided to buy to import your video... don't settle for those cheap USB capture devices.

[twen]

Thanks guys. But isn't AV8 captures to MPEG-1, 2 or avi to your choice? or does it capture to avi only then you have to do the conversion to MPEG-1 or 2?

How's the video quality compares to the original? I know Canopus holds up the quality really good, is it the same for AV8? What about video and audio insync issue, any problem there? (Canopus can lock the audio to guarantee insync with the video) By the way, i'm using Windows 2000 pro.

Anyone else out there have done comparison in terms of quality?

[idTV Nico]

I´m sorry not to be able to compare to the 8AV - but I bought the ADVC 100 and I don´t think you can get any better quality - I use it for productions for the austrian TV station ORF - but I also bought one unit for home use - since I really love this small unit - it does the capture job VERY well - the only "problem" you might have is the conversion to MPEG - it just consumes much time...

idTV Nico

[xxiangg]

Studio AV uses your sound card to capture the audio. You may have a/v sync problem.
I used Studio AV to capture my home made video. A single tape has many segments
of videos. The video signal between each segment is bad. When I used Studio AV to
convert the tape, I started to have a/v sync problem starting from the second video
segment. It is getting worse and worse after each segment.

For the same tape, when I used CanonZR40 pass through mode, I got perfect result. So
I am now considering to buy Canopus, replacing my Studio AV.

By the way, if your video source is perfect, like DVD movie or etc, I think Studio AV is OK