Why Canopus and not just Firewire?

[dross333]

HI, I'm a bit confused why I would need Canopus (or something similar). I am very new to this, but I currently have my camcoder connected to my firewire card and am using VideoStudio to capture. It has been capturing to AVI. My PC is Dell Precision 650, Dual Xeon, 2.5 GB RAM. 250GB HDD. Would I be gaining something by purchasing the Canopus?

If yes, what other software should I get. Please keep in mind, I am trying to keep this simple for now. I only need to convert Camcorder to AVI to MPEG2. And, maybe 1 or 2 VHS movies as well.

Thanks for any advise here.
David

[Supreme2k]

Canopus (ADVC-100), to my understanding, is an excellent analog-to-digital converter (hence the acronym). If you are primarily going to send directly from the firewire on your camera, it wouldn't be beneficial to you.

[The_Doman]

Assuming your camcorder has also analog input/passthrough it would work (almost) exactly the same as the canopus device. Ofcourse with the canopus you get a more fancy box with nice connectors which is a bit easier to handle.
Most analog inputs on DV camcorders work very good I discovered. I personally use a D8 camcorder for that which works extremely well, getting a nice stabilized picture out of it and it seems also immune for all kinds of signal dropouts.

[aguillon]

Yes, Doman and Supreme2K hit it right on the head - the key word is analog to DV conversion.

If you have a firewire input on your PC and a DV Camera with a analog pass-through, that s indeed a good solution.

For those unfortunate souls like myself who have no DV cam or whose cam has no pass thru, you need a piece of hardware with analog input that will let you plug your VCR or old Video Cam into your pc for capture.

ADVC50 and ADVC100 are good solutions for that - they convert analog to DV seamlessly and real time thanks to on-board hardware DV codec implementation. What s more, their video and sound interleaving is good (i.e you don t get videos out of synch like on some cheap capture boards).

I personally own a ADVC50 and the capture results are the best I ve seen sofar. Only downside: it does not come with any softwares and was a bit pricey when I bought it. Money well spent however: it performs exactly as advertised.

[dross333]

Thanks for the replies. I was on the verge on buying the canopus, but wasn't sure why since 99% of what I need to to capture was on my camcorder which has a firewire port. I was also able to connect the analog cable from my VCR to my Camcorder and then the firewire to my PC and was able to capture my VCR tape that way. I just need to work on the quality for that scenerio.

Thanks Much
David

[dun4cheap]

Droos333 if your camcorder has a ilink 1394 FIREWIRE port on it then you would have nothing directly to gain from the canopus. The canopus is mainly used to conver analog (Svideo, Composite Video) to fire or DV Avi format. Another advantage of the the canopus is the DV to analog conversion if you wanted to print back to VHS via firewire or DV. I myself use the ADS Pyro AV Link which is similiar to the Canopus but I was able to pick it up for $100 new. Be warned though some people have had problems with the ADS AV Link, while I have not heard of to many complaints with the Canopus products. If you aren't looking to do any analog to digital conversion then you don't need it.