help choosing capture card

[86peaches]

i want to transfer analogue to digital with the highest possible quality.

at first i was quite interested in the advc series but deicded against capturing that way and instead in favour of capturing lossless or with huffy.

in short: can you provide your opinion on what would be a good piece of hardware to do this (up to £200, definitely (or probably) no more than £250).

[Cobalt5120]

I'm sorta new at this but if you were looking at the ADVC-100 then I believe that would be considered "lossless" which is what you are looking for.

Someone correct me if I am wrong, but going from analogue to DV is as lossless as one can get.

If you used a Dazzle and went from analogue to MPEG(2) then you would be compressing on the fly and THAT would have some loss, but I believe going directly to DV is the way to go, and the ADVC series does that better than anyone.

For the record, the other option is to use the passthrough feature of a digital camcorder. Those seem to be the most popular options!

Larry

[Bodysurf]

I'm sorta new at this but if you were looking at the ADVC-100 then I believe that would be considered "lossless" which is what you are looking for.

Someone correct me if I am wrong, but going from analogue to DV is as
lossless as one can get.

Well, you are wrong. The analog to digital conversion (=DV25) is a lossy one.

HuffYUV, D-5 tape or uncompressed RGB is considered lossless while conversion to DV25/DV50/MJPEG is lossy.

Digital to Digital = no loss. Analog <-> Digital involves loss.

[crahak]

Converting analog to digital, you will have some loss of quality. There are no perfect cards, wires and players... But as far as I'm concerned, it never was my capture equipment limiting me... Even bt8x8'es. Unless you got a D1 source, and you're burning to DVD... else your limitation will be your source, and medium you're encoding to. Don't waste tons of money on something that will practically make no difference if it's your case...

[Cobalt5120]

I stand corrected!

[Bondiablo]

I have the ADVC-100 and I must say the picture quality is excellent. You do realize the file size you're looking at with uncompressed AVI at 720 x 480 is something like 60GB+ per hour. Huffy is an improvement but to truly be lossless it doesn't really compress the file that much. Not to mention all the problems associated with analog captures, even once you get it setup and working properly you may still have dropped frames and audio video sync problems. I'd rather have an imperceptible loss of picture quality, 12GB per hour and no dropped frames or sync problems. Here's kind of an interesting article I came across discussing uncompressed AVI and DV for the purposes of video evidence in court cases. Basically their conclusion was there is very little loss in DV most of which is slight color variations, worst case about .3%, not even enough for the slimiest of lawyers to get it thrown out.

http://www.intergraph.com/solutions/hardware/vas/bios/Video_Technical_Review.pdf

[swampblosm]

hello all. I'm not even a Begginer so please forgive my level of ignorance. Please help me get started in Video capture. My goal is to capture and archive my old Hi8 and 8mm tapes to DVD.
I think I can get most questions answered from the wealth of info out here. But one thing I have not managed to find is the mostest basicest (you're lookin at a real dumby here, I've never done anything like this before.)...
From the reviews I've read it seems that the Canopus ADVC-100 seems like the way to go...the most reliability, versatility, and usability for the $$$. But what else will I need? (Hardware-wise and software-wise.)
Would someone mind taking the time to outfit me so to speak?
I've got a plain ole Sony Hi8 and a Desktop with Athlon850/128Mb RAM. What goes in between?
Thank you for your time!
(sorry if this is the wrong place to post, I'm new at this too!)