Hollywood DV Bridge xfers analog to DV

[Joel0607]

Anyone know if the Hollywood DV Bridge is good? It's supposed to be good. How's the quality of the video? Any known problems with frames, drops, artifacts, or hardware incompatibilities?

Info at http://www.dazzle.com/products/hw_bridge.html
Review at http://www.insanely-great.com/reviews/dazzle.html

Thanks...

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Joel0607 on 2001-12-05 14:40:08 ]</font>

[Joel0607]

Quick follow-up... Can anyone point me to some links where I can learn more about editing DV? I heard some poeple are converting to mpeg but dont know if that is good.

[nickel]

I have the Hollywood. Got it in September, but it didn't work (Win 2000, Soundblaster Audigy's FireWire port). I had to get an exchange with manufacturer. Just got the replacement yesterday. Last night I had time to do one quick test:

10 minutes of VHS video on a worn tape from 1989 (an old high school video project that I want to save). Captured in Premiere. Premiere saved it as a DV .avi at a little over 2GB. I will edit a bit later, but I wanted to test some conversion. TMPEnc can convert the DV .avi directly. I set it for VCD and got an excellent MPG. I also used .wmv encoding in Premiere to produce a 640x480 file at 155MB. Excellent quality! Premiere's .wmv encoding allows for custom bitrate settings (both audio and video). Doing the math, I've figured out the bitrate to use for making a 675MB file so that I can archive this video to CD-R. I didn't have time to run that encode... I'll try tonight. I'm not sure what the best compression format is for archiving on CD-R (that's actually why I'm in the forum now... browsing to see what people are saying about archiving clips), but these large bitrate .wmv files seem very promising. I plan to make VCDs of my videos, plus use the archive CD-Rs to print to VHS for my family members who don't have VCD capable equipment.
I'll be busy through the weekend, so I'm not sure how much more testing I'll be able to do, but I'll let you know. I'm very satisfied with the results of this first test.

Future tests:
Hi8 capture
more old VHS capture
LaserDisc capture
cable TV broadcast capture

-nickel

[Joel0607]

Thank you... Please let me know how this works out.

I'm mainly interested in getting my PC to act like a professional AVID editor. Theoretically, since DV in = DV out, there should be no loss of quality during the capture and editing process.

I figure with something like the Hollywood DV Bridge, I can get away with just using a good firewire card to capture non-DV material. I wouldn't want to use a good firewire card for DV, and a crappy USB or other capture card for analog.