DV Bridge or Analogue capture card???

[franco]

Hi Guys, I am setting up a system for capturing from a VCR analogue source which I then want to put onto DVDR disc. I have seen advice on the net on the following type of set up being well suited to Analogue capture.

A Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge to convert my analogue signal to Digital into a firewire card. I am also hoping to use these with Ulead authoring software. Could you guys give me any advice?? Is this the best possible set up in the $300 price range for capturing analogue.

The shops selling these DV Bridge units claim that analogue capture suffers loss of quality and colour which Digital does not.

I have seen info that the above set up would give "Near DVD Quality" which of course I want but if you can advise me on any better way to get the best possible analogue capture and any problems I might encounter with the above set up I'd be very grateful.

Thanks

[Greg12]

the DV bridge sometimes disappears from IEE bus. This seems to happen when it is dealing with poor quality analog input.

the DV bridge will probally give u better results because it's a hardware digitizer similar to the type in DV cameras.

it will also use significantly less cpu power.

DV Bridge

Good:
IEE1394-Only installation is plugging in a cord.
DV digitizer chip gives better results
In theroy, 0 frame loss.
Can be used on any IEE1394 enabled system.
High quality DV files produced as a result.
Idiot proof, no settings to deal with.

Bad:
Expesensive
Sometimes it disappears
No tv tuner, must have RCA or S-video input
Can only export DV AVI back out to tape.


It's a great lil device minus the disappearing, also look at the Canapus ADVC-100

[solarfox]

An analog-to-DV converter would be much better than an analog capture board.

However -- take it from the man who owns one (and regrets it). Don't buy the Dazzle DVbridge. It's an exceptionally aggravating piece of hardware -- when it works, it works brilliantly, but it is prone to a variety of annoying behaviors... such as dropping off the IEEE bus for no reason (as Greg12 points out), a hair-trigger Macrovision-detection circuit that false-positives more often than I'd like, and frequent "Failed to build a preview graph" errors while capturing (whatever the hell that means) that make me have to stop, back up the tape, and re-capture about one time out of four.

Everyone here seems to be very positive about the Canopus ADVC-100, which does the same job as the Dazzle but for considerably less aggravation... it's the one I plan to invest in fairly soon.

[franco]

Thanks for the info. Well I'll certainly stay away from the Dazzle DV Bridge. Looking at the forum archives it seems most people have problems with this hardware.

Just one question though. How much more time is consumed with conversion to MPEG if you have used a DV Bridge than would be with an analogue capture card.

Since I am thinking about putting many hours of VHS Footage onto DVDR discs will this take forever????

[ItsMe]

That depends on your system and the resolution of the mpeg you are creating. On my P4 2Mhz. I get about 4-7 frames per second when transcoding with tempenc software encoder at 720x576. On the other hand if I use my Vidac VMagic hardware encoder I get about 32 frames per second using similar settings.

[fingernailX]

I am one who goes against the majority of opinion on the DV bridge/ADVC 100 versus analog capture card debate. Granted, capturing in DV and converting to MPEG2 will give you very good results it also takes a long time. For me, tmpgenc is unacceptably long and so is avisynth/CCE. I do have access to Pinnacle's Mpegworks and a Targa 3000 at work which reduces this to a hardware assisited realtime conversion with good quality. The problem (again I am hypersensitive to this issue) is the output is interlaced. Since I watch alot of ripped DVDs, captured TV shows and home movies on a large computer monitor and/or a projector driven by a HTPC I never want anything interlaced. So I capture in 15 Mbps I-frame only NON INTERLACED 720 by 480 Mpeg 2 and trim and encode to progressive non-std VCD, non-std SVCD or progressive DVD formats which are std. Its fast with Xmpeg or the latest Flask and either CCE or LSX plug-in. Even DV footage captured thru S-Video (theoretical 3% loss versus the .01% of DV thru 1394) gives me great results and is almost as fast as the MpegWorks hardware assist method. So Speed and deinterlaced - advantage mpeg2 to mpeg2 Ultimate Quality - DV. Isn't it great to have a choice.

[q1aqza]

If you don't need to edit the analogue captures then the Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250 is pretty good as it encodes in realtime using hardware encoding. All you need to do after is put it through your authoring program. An example, I captured a two hour VHS film in realtime, spent about 15 minutes adding a few chapters in the bundled Ulead Moviefactory, and then an hour spent burning the disc - from VHS to DVD in 3.25 hours is a pretty quick turnaround for a two hour film!

There are a few quirks with this card. Some people get it working fine straight away, some can't get it to work at all or some, like me, get it working fine after a few weeks of trying different things (I had audio sync problems but I have sorted them now), and I'm glad I didn't send it back.

[franco]

Thanks q1aqza, I will need to edit the captures prior to putting them on DVDR. I'll still look up the card you mentioned as it's worth my while to look at different options.

[gf]

You can try Canopus MVR1000. Good reviews from this one, only I did not know about this when I bought my junk Realmagic DVR board.

Steve

http://www.vcdhelp.com/capturecards.php?CaptureCardRead=Canopus%20MVR1000&Search=Search

[epo]

ItsMe mentioned Vidac VMagic HW encoder, but didn't say, it is capture card too with TV tuner option. Only positive reports about this card! I myself have above mentioned PVR-250 (and it works quite well with latest drivers), but I'm thinking quite seriously about geting VMagic.
Using any DV bridge has no real advatage for You as Your source is low quality analog. Only loss of time to make same work in many passes.

[solarfox]

Franco -- based on my experiences with encoding video in ULead Media Studio Pro. the type of source file being encoded to MPEG-2 doesn't seem to change the rendering speed very much either way. I've transcoded DV captures, DivX files, and even other MPEGs to MPEG-2 for burning to DVD-R, and they all seem to require about the same amount of time (which in my case is approximately 2 hours of render time per half-hour of video, though hopefully my switching from PC133 to DDR2100 memory will speed that up a bit )

What determines your render speed is:

(1) Your computer's speed (not just the CPU, but memory and HD speed as well);

(2) The type of file you're encoding to (MPEG-1 generally encodes faster than MPEG-2, which is generally faster than DivX, etc);

(3) How much video processing you're doing along with the render. (I.E. noise filtering, cropping, clip transitions, frame resizing, deinterlacing, etc. will all slow things down significantly compared to a straight 1:1 unprocessed render.)