Canopus ADVC-100 - Is it worth getting?

[edDV]

A good camcorder with pass-through will get the job done but I've found many ways to use my Canopus ADVC-100 that nicely supplement the camcorder.

- most important, I can edit or capture while the camera is in the field being used.

- the ADVC-100 is used to feed my quality control monitor (HDTV monitor) while editing. This way I can see the full resolution DV video and proper colors while I edit.

- the ADVC is useful for routing all analog devices to the Vegas 5 or Premiere scopes for quality monitoring and level setting.

- unlike a capture card, the ADVC-100 can be easily moved between my many machines. Plus it works for Linux or Mac equaly well.

- the ADVC is small enough to travel with my laptop allowing NTSC or PAL material to be captured to HDD while traveling. It also works great for connecting an external monitor to the laptop while editing in a hotel room.

- during presentations I can simultaneously feed Powerpoint and video out of my laptop.

- it works for quality audio capture to either the laptop or the desktop.

- and when it isn't being used for all that, it connects my cable box to a 2.4GHz Celeron computer which acts as a DVR for real time MPeg1 or MPeg2 encoding using Ulead Video Studio's MainConcept encoder.
see https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=253007&highlight=

All in all it makes a versatile video tool that will last through several generations of computers and I can always sell it for near what I paid on Ebay.

[offline]

iownju,

Since you are a Mac person maybe you
should try the mac forum here. They can
better advise you re: imovie/mpeg/dv pasthru
for the Mac.

[lordsmurf]

Moved to MAC forum. Probably should have been there to begin with.

[broaddd]

What's the actual picture conversion like? I use a Formac Studio DV (latest hardware/firmware) which is the same principle. I find video captured from composite sources a little fuzzy - guess that's to be expected, though.