Using SceneAlyzer & Canopus ADVC100 to capture

[dazed women]

I just did my first "capture" using ScenAlyzer and the CanopusADVC100. I just captured a small (39 sec) piece of a video tape. Pretty exciting for me.

I played it back in Windows Media Player and noticed a blue box that keeps popping up every few frames when I play it back. It says ScenAlyzer or something like that. Is this something that will disappear when I pay the $33?

Question #2
Is there a "How to.." on the ScenAlyzer program? When I click on the link "How to capture with a firewire/DV card using ScenAlyzer" the link takes me to the web site. I have to say the web site is not very informative. (Or I am just blind and cannot find the help part of the site.)
Screen shots and that type stuff is very helpful for me since I am such a newbie at this.

Question #3 And how 'bout the editing part. I understand I can edit out the commercials using TPEGnc. I have VideoWave 4.0 that came with the firewire card but I understand it is not a wonderful program.

I originally bought the All-inWonder Radeon8500DV but returned it after reading such unhappy posts.
My new system (With the goal of tranferring my VHS to Disk and making DVD's down the road)
AtlhonXP 1800+
MSI KT3 Ultra 2
80 Gig HD (just one for now. Partitioned in FAT32 with one 50gig partition in NTFS for videos)
on board sound (for now)
Gforce 2 video card (for now)
WinXP home
Adaptec 4300Fireconnect card (cost $50 at CompUSA) with MGI VideoWave 4Software (which I understand is pretty junky)
Nero 5.5 with my CD burner
And of course the Canopus ADVC100 little capture box.

At this point I really don't want to spend any more money. Whew! this has been expensive!

[The village idiot]

I hear the expensive part... You could try using DVio for your captures. It is free and works well (at least running on win2000), here is the link:

http://www.carr-engineering.com/dvio.htm

As for the editing, I finally broke down and spent some money on EditStudio from http://www.puremotion.com they have a free demo if you would like to try it. You might want to download the mpegXS converter while you are there. You can do editing in VirtualDub, but you will need to find a VFW DV codec. You will also have to capture your files as DV type2. Not a problem with either of the above capture programs.

Over all, I have been fairly happy using both DVio, and EditStudio. I then use either DVD moviefactory or DVD workshop to create menus and burn to DVD, VCD, etc.

Oh yeah... You can use DVD Moviefactory to capture, edit and convert to DVD, VCD, SVCD too. Just many people don't like the way the converted video looks.

[ajp]

#1 Yes, the blue watermark will disappear when you register it.

#2 Note sure? Never needed a manual really, found it quite simple. I guess I'm sort of a computer nerd though...

#3 You can't edit DV with Tmpgenc AFAIK, it's mpeg only. Mainconcept EVE ($49) is quite nice and cheap and I hear Pinnacle studio is good too. I guess you can use Videowave too as long as you don't use it to encode to mpeg, it's not very good at that.

[dazed women]

Thanks for the information. I think I will play with what I have for now and see how it goes. Guess I will have to fork over the $33 but since so many people seem pleased with ScenAlyzer, that should be no sweat.

I downloaded editstudio and will look at that program. Can't figure how much it will be US$. Maybe that is for later.

I captured it in Type 2 already. Can you get Max avi size to automatically set for "unlimited" or do I need to remember each time I capture? I have such a terrible memory.

And I haven't figured out how to get the file to play back in Scealyzer. I opened WMM to view it. Does it do that?

[willy_annand]

There are two excellent FREEware programs for simple editing:

TMPEGEnc is for editing MPG clips and VirtualDub is for editing AVI clips.

Both are amazing programs and free. Plus there are how to guides for each on this site. What more could you ask for, lol