Have ??? about canopus ADVC and TMPG

[fishfly]

Hi
I have a couple of questions for ADVC users.
Hopefully you are all happy with this product? If not let me know.
I want to get it for the purpose of bringing in footage from analog and then turning it to mpeg2 with tmpg and burning DVD. I also own a DV raptor card.
On the average with a good machine, how long does it take to turn 2 hours of video into a mpeg2 a high quality?
And when you capture, can you capture 2 hours of footage in one setting, and what software do you use?
What is your process for creating a mpeg2 with all this?
People want me to take their home videos and turn them into DVD.

I know I can get the job done faster with an Instant DVD, but I figure for $100 more I can get a board that offers me DV output just in case I need it. It seems software MPEG2 codecs are always getting better. Not sure the quality of IDVD or if you can put 2 hours of highest quality on a DVD.

What is your thoughts. And let me know if you find the ADVC for under 280.00.

I have the pioneer dvd burner
Thanks

[tazzila]

I've been using the advc-100 for three months now with studio dv7. This set up works great. I only do vcds but studio 7 will also format to dvd mpeg2. I use a p-4 1.4ghz 256mb rd800 memory and a gforce 3 graphics card. capture thru the advc is stright forward and the time to reformat to vcd takes 2hours for every hour of video captured give or take alittle. Have had no audio sync problems what so ever. Have read here that many of the other capture devices have audio sync problems. I have also had no problems with dropped frames. The final product has been good so far I have to give the advc-100 2 thumbs-up!!!!!!!!!. I bought mine from guy graphics for 279.00 call them at 1-800-307-4150. there located in elk grove ca. They have great customer service and also can provide you help if needed. Good luck TAZ MAN

[VideoMann]

The encoding to MPEG2 has nothing to do w/ the ADVC.

I have a P4 2Ghz and used a test run of a 9minute clip AVI and converted to MPEG2 using the highest possible quality w/ Cyberlink Power VCR II.
The highest quality is known as "Constant Quality" and it encodes at 9.8Mbs. If you are putting this on a DVD you could not use this high quality because you would run out of space on the DVD. Most consumer DVDs (not commercial) are encoded between 6-8Mbs (Constant Bit Rate or Variable Bit Rate). The resulting file that I encoded was identical to the quality of the original DV-AVI.

I then did some calculations to see what time it would take to encode a longer clip and this is what I came with:

for every 1 minute of video AVI it took 2.188 minutes to encode to MPEG2

The time is dependent on 3 factors: 1) speed of processor, 2) quality of MPEG2 desired, 3) encoder used.

For some common times it would be:

AVI Clip Orig............................Time taken to encode to MPEG2
15 min...........................................33 min
30 min............................................66 min
60 min............................................131 min

If you go for some hardware encoders at Canopus it says it takes
for every 1 min AVI----> 1.5 min to encode to MPEG2
not Realtime but close. Maybe some of their other encoders do true Realtime but produce fuzzier pictures or they may cost quite a bit more ($1500-2000 encoders)

Encoding time is the number 1 issue in making DVDs of high quality.