dazzle DV bridge for hardware encoding?

[statuspending]

does this thing perform hardware mpeg encoding if you are capturing from analog sources?

dazzle's product description is worthless....ican't find this info anywhere.

thanks

[humdinger]

nope, it converts analog 2 DV so you can cap via firewire as a dv stream (thats y its called a dv bridge) there good, but i wouldntt recommend one unless u have a Mac.

[statuspending]

so.... it converts from analog to DV, but does not compress into mpeg?

ok then... so, suppose i have a dv bridge connected to the firewire on my p2-300mhz.... i capture from vcr/cable to dv on my computer.

i would still need to encode it then?
what kind of file format would record on my hard drive?


thanks

[TheInformer]

statuspending,

What you might want to look at is a Sony DVMC-DA2 media converter.
It takes the analog input, composite or s-video, and outputs it via
firewire. You can then connect it to your MiniDV camcorder or your computer,
if it has a firewire card/connecter in it. The video is converted in either case
to DV format which IMHO is a snap to re-encode into MPEG-2 files via TMPGEnc.

Getting the analog video into DV format will save you lots of headaches...

BTW, I haven't heard a bad thing about the DVMC-DA2. There have been
issues however with the DV Bridge.

I'm saving my money to buy a DVMC-DA2, for what it's worth.

[humdinger]

the dv footage appears on your computer as an avi, which will need to be encoded 2 mpg. beware tho, 10econds of dv footage is about 36mb...

[statuspending]

thanks for your replies.

i will have to figure out then where to go from here.

i go from p2-300 to athlon's top of the line in april...
it's about time for a change.

thanks

[BlackBear]

Look at http://www.miglia.com for Directors Cut. I considered the dazzle but decided against it. I have only just started using this box and so far so good - it even works well with windows 98FE.

[EricB]

If you are looking at the Sony or Dazzle unit, consider a low-level Sony D8 camcorder with analog-in. The unit will do the analog->digital and digital->analog conversion, plus give you a place to store the huge DV files that you might want to archive.