dv.now.av want to Upgrade to Canopus ADVC-100

[rjs]

Does anyone have any experience with the dv.now.av?

I have been using this product for more than a year and really love it! It is a PCI card and comes with a breakout box. It came bundled with Premier 6.0. It was distributed by Dazzle BUT was NOT a Dazzle product. It was made by FAST and uses the FAST DV codec. The video is saved to a quicktime .dif file and compressed with the FAST DV codec. They stopped making this device, or at least seemed to have stopped supporting it and I want to upgrade.

I will continue to use this product with Premier 6.0 and its breakout box but I want to build another machine and upgrade to the latest version of Premier and get a device that works through Firewire so I am considering the Canopus ADVC-100.

Ive had GREAT results capturing with the FAST product and then saving to DVD using Cinema Craft encoder.

Can anyone tell me how the quality will compare to what Im now getting with the Dv.now.av and its FAST DV codec????

[FulciLives]

First I don't have a Canopus ADVC-100 or any DV device like it. However I read a lot of shit here and have seen many screen shots of captures.

The quality of the Canopus ADVC-100 is very good and I think you will be happy with it.

However ...

Some people complain that the picture can be oversaturated especially the color red. From my research this seems to be a flaw not so much with DV codecs in general but a flaw specific to the Canopus DV codec.

Since the Canopus ADVC-100 does the conversion from analog to DV in hardware there is no way around this.

Having said that many seem to get great results by tweaking the saturation and or colors while doing their MPEG-2 encoding. TMPGEnc Plus has such color controls. This can also be done in VirtualDub which can then frameserve to your encoder of choice (including CCE). I think it can also be done with AviSynth.

Otherwise the quality should be as good as what you are getting now with that other device (which I recall reading about when it came out but then it seemed to "fizzle" as no one ever seemed to really talk much about it).

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Bondiablo]

There's also a setting in TMPGEnc's general environmental settings specifically for the Canopus codec. "Interpolate YUV data from 4:1:1 to 4:4:4"