Update on analog video capture:
Ok, the Pinnacle MovieBox USB came in Saturday. I hooked it right up with no real muss of fuss. It's a pretty little box and it pretty straight forward in the set up. Since I already have Studio 9 Plus there was no real installation and the drivers installed right off the bat with the USB recognizing the box.
OK, here's comes the test! I set this up as a pure analog system. This meant cabling over to the box from the VCR with RCA jacks (No S-Video on my cheap VCR). Open up Studio and select capture. Oops! If your going to capture from the MovieBox, you must go into the setup and selects it as your source. Studio does not auto-select.
OK, now I have it configured. Came right up. Interesting interface. You have a few areas that you can change (brightness, contrast, etc) real time during the capture. This helped as the initial capture was a bit dark.
MovieBox captures from a VCR in MPEG-2 format. This is all well and good, but not as good as AVI if you want to use Studio (or NLE of your taste) to edit the capture before outputting to another format. The capture was decent. There is compression artifacting throughout the capture and there was some color bleed on some of the still captures. All in all, not a bad solution for what I paid.
Studio 9, on the other hand, reared up it's ugly head on the edit side. For some reason, it really didn't like the capture and simply would not keep up with it in preview. The sound went way out of sync as opposed to what I was viewing. This required several start and stops of the preview just to see what was happening. Fortunately, this didn't translate over to the DVD as bad. On a 60 minute video, there was noticable out of sync after about 45 minutes. It wasn't bad, but enough to be a little distracting.
So, I have now made it my vow to not capture more than 15 to 20 minutes of Analog video at a time. If I need more than that, I will create another file. I will also look into encoding or converting the MPEG2 file to AVI for final editing and burning to DVD depending on quality loss as there is a definite quality loss just in the capture.
Final conclusion: It will work for now. This may be a decent solution for those that have the older cameras that don't support DV Out (Firewire or USB). It relatively cost effective as I found the MovieBox for $50 on E-Bay and that was brand new in a factory sealed box. This is opposed to $130 retail.
All in all, it's reasonable. It certainly isn't the greatest, but it 'ain't' the worst I've seen either.
Obviously, somthing that captures in AVI and feeds through Firewire is a better solution. I'm looking at some of the Canopus units right now. Now I only wish there were an affordable Mini-DV tape player that allowed DV out to computer.
Awwww someday. :roll:
