Looking for suggestions on capturing setup

[Donny661]

The past few days I have been seriously considering various setups for capturing VHS movies and then burning to DVD. I'm a college student right now, and I would like to turn VHS conversion into a small money making venture so I can work with something I like doing instead of being at my current job. The DVD authoring and burning portion I don't have any doubts about as I have been backing up DVDs to mainly VCDs and SVCDs for a few years now. I decided I don't want to capture straight to MPEG-2. But, I am a little unsure about what capturing setup I should go with. I've casually glanced at the various methods of capturing before, and I have been seduced by things I have heard about the Canopus ADVCs. Also, I decided I need a steup with TBC built into it somewhere, and I would like to include an SVHS VCR that is better than the $50 Zenith VCR I have access to currently. This brings me to the three compilations of equitment I have thought would be good for achieving what I want from it.

1: ADVC 110 (or 100) (~$260) from B&H
+ DataVideo TBC 100 (~$200) from B&H
+ JVC HRS-3902 SVHS VCR (~$104) from B&H
=~$564

2: ADVC 110 (or 100) (~$260)
+ JVC SR-V101US SVHS VCR (TBC built in) (~$280) from B&H
=~$540

3: ADVC 300 (TBC built in) (~$455) from dv411 with academic discount
+ JVC HRS-3902 SVHS VCR (~$104)
=~$559

As you can see they all would end up costing near the same price with nearly the same features, which I thought was surprising when I added them up. I was wondering what you guys would think about which would offer the best quality. Has anyone had experience with the ADVC 300 and is it's TBC on par with the TBC 100? Also, the JVC SR-V101US I think is the bottom of the professional line of VCRs offered by JVC and seemed to be the same as the consumer HRS-3902 but with TBC and other editing features. I don't need the editing features though. Would the TBC in the SR-V101US be of worse quality than the TBC 100 and/or on the ADVC 300?

Like I said before, I chose the Canopus ADVCs because I have always heard good things about them, and before, whenever I thought about getting into capturing, the ADVC 100 always is the device I wanted to get; other devices and cards seem to have mixed reviews. Although, I would be open to getting a capture card (not a TV tuner card, one with S-Video input), except those made by Dazzle or ATI. I haven't heard many good things about Dazzle, and I don't want to pay for a video card too like with the ATI cards. I would be willing to spend up to $260 for a good card and replace the ADVC 100 in the first or second setup (or the third if the card has TBC built in).

Thank you for reading this far and I would appreciate any of your suggestions or experiences!

[yoda313]

Hello,

I decided I don't want to capture straight to MPEG-2.

Do you mean you're going to capture to AVI and then convert to mpeg2???? If so that would probably yield better results than straight to mpeg depending on your card (though my WINTV PVR 250 is mpeg only and is very good at mpeg2).

But just remember MPEG 2 is your final destination before authoring so if time is a consideration save a conversion step and record straight to mpeg2. That way all you'll have to do is author and burn and skip converting to mpeg. MUCH faster in my opinion.

Kevin

[Donny661]

I would like a solution that allows me to capture to .avi (lossless or high-quality lossy like DV) and then convert to MPEG-2 with TMPG or MainConcept. That way I think the final DVD will be better quality because I can encode with multi-pass VBR. I want to make as good of quality conversions as I can. I know it takes longer, but I am willing to do that for the gain in quality. I mentioned TMPG here because I am very familiar with it, but I forsee I will probably want to switch to MainConcept or Procoder for speed reasons.

Thank You for your comments though!

[FulciLives]

I would recommend the following:

1.) Capture Device
Canopus ADVC-100 or DataVideo DAC-100

2.) A Stand Alone Full Frame TBC Device
DataVideo TBC-1000 or the AVT-8710 by TVOne aka AV Tool Box

3.) S-VHS VCR
JVC HRS-9911 or JVC SR-V101US

If money is no object I would get the following:
1.) DataVideo DAC-100
2.) DataVideo TBC-1000
3.) JVC HRS-9911 S-VHS

If you are on a bit of a budget then get:
1.) DataVideo DAC-100
2.) AVT-8710
3.) JVC SR-V101US

You might also want to try and buy a cheap Digital8 cam and a cheap miniDV cam as you will probably have a lot of people that want those formats converted to DVD as well. Might also want to get a LaserDisc player from eBay though most LD fans are tech heads and probably do LD to DVD themselves.

Also you will need to learn AviSynth scripting and CCE because that will give you the best combination of processing power (i.e., filters) with high quality and super encoding speed (at least when compared to TMPGEnc Plus which is slow as hell plus it uses the dreaded RGB colorspace).

Another thing to remember ... the NTSC DV AVI format has the 4:1:1 color sampling thing going on (which is bad) so be aware that there are filters to "fix" that. One exists for AviSynth and another exists for VirtualDub.

In the future ...

You might also want to consider eventually getting a PAL capable VHS VCR so you can do PAL VHS to NTSC DVD-R conversions. The best PAL VHS VCR is probably the Toshiba 6-Head units unless you can find the PAL version of the JVC S-VHS HRS-9911 but that will be damn expensive so the Toshiba is probably best for PAL stuff.

Last but not least ... I should mention that I favored the DAC-100 over the ADVC-100 because everyone seems to think that the DAC-100 has better color that more truely represents the original source whereas the ADVC-100 tends to oversaturate the colors especially the color red.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Donny661]

Thanks for your reply FulciLives

Is there any reason why you suggest the AVT-8710 over DataVideo's TBC 100? They are about the same price, and I read in a few forum topics that the TBC 100 is the same as the 1000 but not in a standalone enclosure, which is why I had thought about the 100. I have not heard anything about the AVT-8710. As far as my budget, I think I would only like to spend up to $600, so I think the HRS-9911U will be too much. Also, do you think that the TBC in the JVC SR-V101US VCR is anywhere near as good as the standalone TBCs? I will also look a little bit more at getting the DAC-100 instead of the ADVC-100(110).

[nelson133]

You may want to try the Canopus box without the tbc, I've done some pretty bad video tapes without one and the results were good. Another advantage of the Canopus box is that it will do black and white video and I have read that the dac doesn't. Further I haven't seen the color problem mentioned above either. I understand the theory, but don't see the results. So much of this stuff is in the eye of the beholder, you need to check it out for yourself.
My Canopus box removes commercial video copy protection, but I have read that the newer ones may not and then you may need some kind of tbc.
I'm talking about the Canopus 100 btw, I think the 300 is way overpriced.
Nyah Levi

[FulciLives]

Thanks for your reply FulciLives

Is there any reason why you suggest the AVT-8710 over DataVideo's TBC 100? They are about the same price, and I read in a few forum topics that the TBC 100 is the same as the 1000 but not in a standalone enclosure, which is why I had thought about the 100. I have not heard anything about the AVT-8710.

The TBC-100 as in the PCI PC version? Forget that! Either go with the DataVideo TBC-1000 (which is an external unit for around $300.00) or the AVT-8710 (which is an external unit for around $200.00).

As far as my budget, I think I would only like to spend up to $600, so I think the HRS-9911U will be too much. Also, do you think that the TBC in the JVC SR-V101US VCR is anywhere near as good as the standalone TBCs? I will also look a little bit more at getting the DAC-100 instead of the ADVC-100(110).

Well the JVC S-VHS VCR's have what is called a Line TBC whereas the DataVideo TBC-1000 and the AVT-8710 are Full Frame TBC devices ... this is generally better than a Line TBC and only a Full Frame type TBC will defeat copy protection. Sometimes you can use both a Line and Full Frame TBC but if you had to have one over the other you would want the Full Frame TBC.

The DataVideo DAC-100 can almost always do Black and White as most forms of Black and White have some "color signal" in them ... it simply cannot do "pure" Black and White which is rather rare.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman