Canopus ADVC-100 vs. ADVC-110 vs. ADVC-300

[VHStoThunderport]

Thanks lordsmurf.

My MacBook Pro is running MacOS Catalina (10.15.6), however I also have a 2013 iMac running High Sierra, if that was needed at a pinch.

Hopefully that narrows the field.

[hiptune]

I came across this thread via general internet search. I see it's somewhat dated, but wondered if anybody has any suggestions for the hardware I'm best acquiring.

I have a Sharp VCR player and recorder, model VC-H730.

I have a bunch of 30-ish year old VHS tapes containing hours upon hours of home video, which I’d like to convert to digital.

I have a 2019 16” MacBook Pro 2.4GHz 8-core i9, 32GB 2667 MHz DDR4, 4TB SSD.

I’m thinking about acquiring the necessary converter to enable me to export the VHS content to the MacBook Pro. Anybody know what I need, and have a recommendation? Are these ADVC-nnn devices still sold? Have they been replaced, and if so what's the latest and greatest?

Also, there’s a variety of professional services who offer conversion services, for a cost of somewhere around AUD 25 to 40 per tape, some depending on number of tapes. Is the kinda gear they’re likely to have going to end up producing a better quality end result?

Any thoughts / tips gratefully received.

Your question is a year old, but....

The ADVC boxes are really wonderfully dependable analog to DV converters. And are found now used at rather nice prices. If you search eBay and do not take the first one you find, you can nab them for dimes on the dollar compared to what they sold for new at retail. I own the original ADVC-100 and a ADVC 500. I wanted a few features found on the 500 unit and had the cash so I sprang for it. A Time Base Corrector is very useful on old tales, and the Data Video TBC-1000 is a proven warhorse for tape capture used between the deck and the converter box. But these units are long out of production and an item that went for $279 back in 1994 or 1995 now fetched $1,000 to $1,200 used on eBay.

So those are two pieces of gear many around these parts used successfully. DV is fine for VHS, color saturation may have faded on those tapes and DV or AVI files are very easy to boost up in color saturation/ contrast if needed from those old tapes.

[hiptune]

if anybody has any suggestions for the hardware I'm best acquiring.

These Canopus boxes are dated 1990s technology. DV loses color quality. It's really unacceptable for NTSC, and tolerable for PAL. These are many better capture card options, for both Windows and Mac. Exact OS matters more than platform. You didn't mention what you're using.

I'm not entirely anti-DV, I'll understand when you're essentially backed into a corner, no other options (usually due to newest macOS in use), unable to build a quality capture system.

I have a Sharp VCR player and recorder, model VC-H730.

Minimally passable VCR. Not great, not good, just passable. An ES10/15 is required in the chain, after the VCR.

Have they been replaced,

For the past 15-20 years, yes.

and if so what's the latest and greatest?

The latest-and-greatest isn't what you want: those are crappy HD cards. What you need is pre-HD and post-DV, the sweet spot of the mid/late 00s and early 10s hardware.

Lord Smurf’s I know you’ve never been a fan of the Canopus ADVC boxes. That’s fine. But you did not offer any names or model numbers of better converters or cards that may have come along.

I’d bet the ADVC units are still in use in a big way for tape to digital transfers. And that those boxes are still kicking (provided the FW 1394 jacks are not fried on them from hot-swapping the data cable while powered on).

I feel that VHS is such a crude and outdated format of sub-standard quality that good old DV is not going to muck things up any worse really.

[DB83]

I will concur that Ls has a long history with issues concerinng ADVC boxes.


With respect, these issues are two-fold.


1. The ADVC has various claims that it acts like a line TBC. From my own personal experience it cleans up the anolog >> digital picture. Certainly before the addition of the ADVC 300 in to the capture path my captures were distorted. Of course I also note that you also use a ADVC 500 which would be beyond the financial budget of users when these units were 'king'. I know only two well when I acquired my 300 that it was a purchase that I could ill-afford making a mistake over.


2, Ls has gone on record here that 'in it's day' DV transfer was fine simply because one shot one's video with a DV camera etc.. Now we have better capture possibilities even for VHS. One such issue was color-subsampling. Whereas PAL DV was 4.2.0 - The same as DVD - NTSC was sub-sampled at 4.1.1 somewhat inferior to that. And today 4.2.2 is superior to both.


So an ADVC is fine (espec in PAL-land) but not superior to lossless avi caprure.

[lordsmurf]

I’d bet the ADVC units are still in use in a big way for tape to digital transfers.

Nope. Those 20+ year-old devices fell out of favor long ago. It's just plain damned old tech now, not legacy/useful, the best of the 1990s, made for Pentium III computers (with Pentium II minimum specs).

I feel that VHS is such a crude and outdated format of sub-standard quality that good old DV is not going to muck things up any worse really.

And you'd be wrong. 50%+ of color data is tossed out (for NTSC, less for PAL), and it began to get heavily notice as larger HDTVs became the norm. Those old CRTs and tiny crappy LCD/plasma screens were hiding the fact that the DV boxes were raping the color signal.

A Time Base Corrector is very useful on old tales, and the Data Video TBC-1000 is a proven warhorse for tape capture used between the deck and the converter box. But these units are long out of production and an item that went for $279 back in 1994 or 1995 .

Nonsense. For starters, the TBC-1000 was not produced in 1994, nor was the MSRP of a new TBC-1000 only $279. You're also conflating mid/late 1990s dollars with 2020 dollars, not taking inflation into account. In general, inflation is 2x, but it's far higher with photo/video gear (a good comp is 2.8 lenses, which are at least 3x now).

fine for VHS, color saturation may have faded

This is a BS myth. There is no such thing as "color fade". It's magnetic, not film.

1. The ADVC has various claims that it acts like a line TBC.

Ugh, I forgot about that nonsense.
And the ADVC-300 "TBC" is pathetic, worse than a Panasonic ES25 (weak). I doubt the ADVC-500 is much better.

[dellsam34]

So those are two pieces of gear many around these parts used successfully. DV is fine for VHS, color saturation may have faded on those tapes and DV or AVI files are very easy to boost up in color saturation/ contrast if needed from those old tapes.

I've captured all my PAL VHS tapes to DV about 20 years ago and had to recapture them all over again to lossless AVI about 5 years ago after I had my doubts about the quality I got from DV so joined digitafaq.com and posted clips of DV vs lossless and the members pointed out all the problems DV has, That's when I've had it with DV and sold my capture box Edirol VMC-1 which blows the ADVC-300 out of the water. The VMC-1 produces rock solid videos with its built in frame synchronizer and no audio sync even if you capture for 6 hours, Yet it wasn't a match for lossless capture. Not just NTSC, PAL also suffers under DV since the vertical chroma resolution is halved, only 288 lines of chroma vs full 480 lines of chroma for NTSC. Horizontally PAL fares well in chroma compared to NTSC.

[nogginvid]

Not just NTSC, PAL also suffers under DV since the vertical chroma resolution is halved, only 288 lines of chroma vs full 480 lines of chroma for NTSC. Horizontally PAL fares well in chroma compared to NTSC.

True - but PAL was usually viewed using a delay-line PAL decoder which averaged successive pairs of lines to avoid Hanover bars on phase errors (delay line averaging gives you a saturation drop instead).

Most PAL decoders in use will use this line-averaging decoding route - so the 144 line resolution chroma in a 288 line PAL field isn't hugely controversial, and is why PAL DV is usually 4:2:0 (matching PAL analogue decoder behaviour). NTSC isn't based around delay line average decoding, but has a very low native chroma res, so NTSC DV 4:1:1 made more sense for it.

I wouldn't die on a hill to demand 4:2:2 capture of PAL VHS - when once it's been through most capture card decoders it's probably nearer 2:0.5:0 at best - however if you can capture at 4:2:2 - why not?

HOWEVER - I do agree that DV isn't a great choice of codec for noisy PAL VHS captures - as the DV codec uses intra-frame DCT, which is hammered by noise, and VHS is very noisy...