Video Capture Question?

Hello all! My Son just purchased a DVD Burner...He's looking for a Cheap Video capture card for transfering home VHS tapes to DVD-R...nothing fancy, just reasonable...Any suggestions?

 

I use this and Roxio 7

 

Yep, or Pinnacle's PCI caputure card.

 

Thanks Larry...looks good!

 

Do not buy the cheap TV@nywhere cards.

 

I'd also suggest looking at this:
http://www.canopus.us/US/products/ADVC-100/pm_advc-100.asp
as it's very highly regarded. You might have to add a Firewire card to his computer if you don't already have one...oh, and get a bigger HD....oh, don't forget the RAM....and then there's the.... ;-)
have fun!

 

If you need to capture video and sound from TV as well as VHS to DVD-R, the ultimate card for that is the ATI TV Wonder Pro which costs $400

 

I use the Dazzle 90, like Larry's but USB2. It also came with Pinnacle 9 bundled. $85.00 at Fry's

 

Ok...so with a firewire port and a highly specced PC what else is required? Am I correct in understanding that the Canopus is like the video equivalent of a USB soundcard so that no other hardware is required (and an ordinary spec video card is ok because its not capturing anything?)
Does this leave the only other requirement to be capture software? If so what do you recommend?
TIA.

 

It depends what format it captures in.

If the capture card uses a propriety hardware codec then you may be stuck using the manufacturers capture utility and editing tools.
If the capture card uses a DV or more friendly hardware codec then you can likely capture and edit with just about anything.

I use the Pinnacle DV/AV which does both analog and digital (firewire) capture. Note that USB is NOT fast enough for high quality capture, USB-2 is fine or Firewire. I use Pinnacle ‘Studio’ to capture and Adobe Premier 6 to edit and finally Roxio to burn to DVD. I have used a half dozen ‘other’ applications for each phase and still use some others now and then but these work easiest for me under WinXP pro.

At home I have a cheap ($55) LeadTek TV card. It capturers directly to DVD and is actually peaty darn good! It also captures directly to MPEG-2 at 720 x 480 which can easily be transferred to DVD, no editing is possible in the MPEG format (well not really).

 

I may be wrong but for capturing VHS I don't think you can use firewire that's for digital capture. For capture software I like Pinnacle. You can do lots of different editing with it.

 

If I understand correctly the Canopus ADVC-100 outputs a digital firewire signal and is pretty well regarded. I don't know whether it comes with capture software though. If it didn't I wonder if Windows Moviemaker (version 2) would be any good for it? Or is Moviemaker only good for editing?

Please excuse my lack of knowledge here.