Canopus ADVC-100 noise problems

[aleath]

I just got my ADVC-100 back today after sending it to Canopus to fix since it was one of the defective units. I converted a 14 year old VHS tape to DV and captured it in Pinnacle Studio 8, only to find noise on three sides. On the left and right there is black space and on the bottom there is blurred video. I went into Premiere and found that I could crop it, but since I have a relatively slow computer I do not want to have to do this every time. When I watch the source VHS tape on my TV there are no artifacts like I see on my PC. I have read through the forum and have found that it could be the following possibilities

1) Bad Firewire cable
2) Interference from RF noise or etc around converter box
3) DV video has artifacts when viewed on PC and when viewed on TV it will look like source video

I plan on testing these ideas when I have time, but have I missed any or am I wrong on any of them?

As I said earlier I just got my ADVC-100 back, so I have no idea what converted video looks like from a non-defective ADVC-100. Maybe when they flashed the firmware on my ADVC it screwed something up?

Any help is greatly appreciated

[pb]

If you are seeing uniform black space on the sides and noise on the bottom then it sounds like your aspect ratio is wrong (black on the side) and the noise on the bottom is the VCR head swap over. This should not be seen once rendered back to tape as the change over effect is outside the safe area. TV pictures overscan, so you do not see anything outside the safe zone. On the PC you see the whole picture at what ever resolution. A video NLE program should have a preview that shows safe areas etc.

Try rendering back to VHS and you should not see the effects you describe.

[Lamont Cranston]

aleath I have a ADVC100 and initially thought the unit was defective because of the artifacts (noise) at the boundaries of text in the title. I learned this was a characteristic of DV video. First, I assume you have checked the dip switch on the bottom of the ADVC100 to make sure the switches are set correctly? Have you tried to capture from a 'new' tape and vcr or another source? Better yet, if you have, or can borrow, a digital camcorder and use the camcorder to capture the video from the vcr and compare the results. As pb said you are looking at the full video frame on your computer including the boundary defects which are eliminated by overscan. When looking at the full frame I see narrow black bands on the left and right and with video tape there is head there is switching noise at the bottom of the picture. You may see also see blurred video at the bottom of the picture for a few scan lines. When you view this video on tv vertical height and width are setup so these boundary problems' are outside the viewing area on the tube (over scan).

What was the defect with your ADVC100 that you had to return it for repair?

[ironwood321]

As with all capture hardware these days.
They don't do macrovission and the ADVC will alerts you to the fact.
Also they like a good crisp clear, strong signal otherwise you'll be dropping frames and having jitter.

If this is an old tape perhaps its oxide is eroding away also is not very good (multi gen copy) or it was recorded on a different machine from which you where playing it back.

Perhaps your heads need cleaning or changing on your vcr.

Or your cables are bad

What is the play back quality like, say on a TV ? Some people have this mistaken impression that you can feed any type of rubbish in and get pristine stuff out.

Perhaps you might need some form of video stabilising device. (TBC)

Also perhaps you are undermining system performance as you have to maintain a constant 45Mbits/s

Do you have a nice drive for AV which is empty for capture? No virus killers, games or other things running to clog system performance. You'll need a fairly lean system with plenty of space.

[vhelp]

aleath,
There are all kinds of
* Capture devices.. same goes for
* Converters and ie, ADVC-100
* Transferers

Every one of these "devices" have or operate in their own way. Some
will produce noise on top, while other on bottom, and yet others at
the sides. This is considered "normal". Again, every form of capture
device (above) may or may not have these issues, but you also have
to take into considereation that the device or unit you are capturing
the video from could also be the culprit adding to the issues. Add
to that, the source, ie Tape and quality there'of ect.

In my case, when I use my ADVC-100, with my Satalite (DirecTV) I will
sometimes get a slighte streak of white dashes, sor of like S.O.S.
And, also, I get this black bar to my left. It's not bad. Really.
Its only a couple of pixels. Just cut it off from the top and left,
and in your case, you would do the same for your issues.
But, when cutting pixels, WATCH your "aspect ratio" or you could
ruin it or throw it off balance for tmpg, etc.

So far, the ADVC-100 has provem excellent in my projects.. so far.
-vhelp

[aleath]

Thanks all for all the help

Lamont Cranston: What was the defect with your ADVC100 that you had to return it for repair?

I got one of the ADVC-100s that had bad firmware, so when I first plugged it in it wanted an AV/C Monitor driver. Canopus said it only affected a small amount of the ADVC-100s.. this is why no one has ADVC-100s in stock

I'm going to render the video to a DVD and see how it looks.. unfortunately it takes about 350 seconds to render 1 minute of video in mpeg2 on my computer, so this works out to 8 hours and 45 minutes of rendering for my 90min movie. I'll let you all know how it goes after that!

[Lamont Cranston]

aleath,

If you wanted a quick look you could run your vcr out through the advc100 as before and plug an S cable or composite in the appropriate output of the ADVC100 and plug the other end of the cable into your tv.

[ironwood321]

Hi,
I think I know where your vertical and horizontal things are derived from.

If you have a little bit of repeated video or horizontal bar near the bottom of the video this usually a result of your vcr and how things are played back. More modern vcrs tend to alleviate this problem.

A cheap Mitsumi from Dixons had this problem but an new JVC S-VHS did not have this problem.

Any horizontal bits of white at the top of the picture are little things at the edge of the video which sometimes you don't see. This depends on how this footage was recorded/broadcast and edited.

It might be best to clip this off and replace with black.

Vertical bars of black at the sides of your video only occur on PAL video and they are a result of converting video to the digital platform.

When standards where agreed for video there where lots of arguments and discussions about sampling frequencies and pixels and it was decided to use 720 x 480 or 720x 576 D1 in the digital domain using 13.5Mhz gives you exactly 720 pixels.

The trouble is the same frequency works for analogue NTSC but if you use it with analogue PAL 13.5Mhz produces 702 lines which get converted to 704 lines D1 Cropped. Because DV is 720 lines some black bars are added to make the standard behave to specifications.

PAL should be sampled at 13.85Mhz to give you 720 pixels D1.

Some converters stretch the video others leave alone. So its best to crop the black off your video and stretch it to 720.

Or if your final outputs for viewing on TV you don't have to bother as you will never see video in these areas on a standard TV set.