Capturing VHS with ADVC-55 not working / PowerDirector

[Goldfish]

Hi guys,
ADVC-55 box connected to VCR and to desktop, light still red. Nothing happens.
PowerDirector seems to receive nothing. Any ideas?
Thanks

David

[DB83]

The simplest solution is not to use PowerDirector for capturing (it appears to support a DV Camera but it might still not recognise an ADVC as a valid source)


Transfer your VHS via the ADVC with WinDV and then import the DV-avi that is created into PowerDirector. Since there are two types of DV-avi >> Type 1 and Type 2 << do a short sample of both to see which one PowerDirector accepts.

[johnmeyer]

+1 to everything DB83 said. My only addition is that you might want to use Scenalyzer (a.k.a., SCLive) as your capture software. It has all sorts of bells & whistles which I always found useful. As one example, when I transfer VHS tapes, I use an old VCR to FF to the end. Very often video is not recorded all the way to the end, and the digital counter will stop as soon as no signal is on the tape. I then zero the counter and rewind. The reading on the counter tells me how long it will take until all the video on the tape is captured. Scenalyzer has a stop timer that will stop the recording after whatever time you set. You can also set it up so it stops capturing after not seeing a signal for some period of time, like a minute or two.

There are other possible workflows ...

[Goldfish]

Thanks guys.
I will try.

[dvd3500]

Was not aware of the timer feature... sounds like a good one!

[LMotlow]

Was not aware of the timer feature... sounds like a good one!

DB83 and johnmeyer will be more than happy to show you how to clean up the ugly DV mosquito noise and other lossy compression artifacts from your VHS captures.

[Goldfish]

For sure, any advice welcome

[Goldfish]

hi guys
scenalyzer worked very well. thanks

[geodesic]

I am having a similar problem to the original poster of this thread. I have tried everything suggested so far of this thread. I am trying to capture VHS using an ADVC-55.I have used Adobe premier pro 2018 7 day trial as the capture software. I am also using a Panasonic NV-HS860 S-VHS VCR. The PC is running windows7. On two occasions I have managed to successfully transfer two tapes. The light did go green and tapes transferred with no problems. However, whatever I now do, I cannot get the light to shift from red to green. I have tried WinDV and sclive, but with no success. I have attached a camcorder to the canopus 55 box with the same result.

I am new to this and have no idea how to proceed. Is there any diagnostic I can use to determine the state of the ADVC-55 or anything else I can do to fix or determine the origin of the problem ?

Thanks for any help/advice anyone may be able to give.

[johnmeyer]

If the capture device is not recognizing the computer, and if you don't get a "beep" from the computer when you connect the 1394/Firewire cable, then I'd suspect the cable.

[geodesic]

Hello, thank you for the reply.

I have tried three different brands of 6 pin firewire cable to no avail. I have also tried two different plugin firewire cards, both apparently functioning correctly with the 2006 legacy driver installed. I have used three alternate shielded s-video and composite video cables.

The canopus box is detected by the adobe premiere pro and sclive as in a "stopped" state. I have also rebuilt the windows 7 box from scratch just in case.

Given that the Canopus 55 did work twice, I would like to hope that there is a workaround to my problem. However, I cannot recreate the conditions for which it worked and I have no idea how to troubleshoot this problem beyond buying another canopus card/external box.

[dvd3500]

Any chance of trying a different computer?

[geodesic]

Hello, thanks for the reply.

I do have a couple of other computers that I could rebuild, but would have to move one of the firewire cards into it. Is it likely to be the computer, such as an interrupt conflict between cards or the motherboard or could it be the OS I am using; would windows XP be a better fit than windows 7 with legacy drivers ?


Thanks