I have just purchased the ADVC 100 and its great, nice neat little unit and XP recognised it as soon as it was switched on...


Flack

I think Clyde wants to read this as well.

The 300 has a nice menu that you can use on the fly to capture starting with default settings and then all kinds of tweaks for noise, agc, 3d, 2d, saturation, brightness, contrast and a whole bunch of other stuff. It does a nice job cleaning up bad video from old tapes.
Its an extremely "happy" device if you know what I mean.

JJK

JJKizak,

How good is the 300 really on cleaning up old video? I'm almost ready too buy one but the price is quite high in Canada.

How good of a job can it do on an old VHS recording thats jumping up and down, with some black banding on the bottom, grainy, and the colour is way off? Can it totally stop the jumping, banding and clean it up to be a useable shot? Is it that good?

Thanks

I'm not JJKisak but I will say the 300 is not a miracle device. The tape you describe sounds like it has many problems and may even have some physical damage. A time base corrector can help stabilize the jumping but not the color problems and graininess. Sorry about that.

Mike

The noise reduction tools in the 300 may help with some of the 'grain' butat a price. The 3D noise reduction can introduce ghosting on fast motion and the 2D NR is pretty much a median kind of filter which will make the image softer but it'll do it in real time unlike Vegas which will take a long time to render the median FX.

At the end of the day the 300 is probably about as good as it gets for the task unless you can find a VHS machine with dropout compensation. This can only work inside the VCR as it needs the RF signal coming off the heads to know a line or part thereof is missing. If you can find such a machine I'm certain you'll pay big time for it. I've only seen this technology on UMatic VCRs so I cannot even say for certain IF such VHS machines existed.

If your material is seriously valuable you could send it after its been captured thru a TBC to someone with an Archangel by S&W, those boxes can fix about anything by pasting bits from other frames etc. You will pay big time though.

Bob.

Sab,

I don't have a tape that bad YET! That was just a senerio. I'm just trying to get an idea of how good the 300 is? Here in Canada its like $750.00 plus tax and I dont want too pay that much if it don't do justice for bad footage.

You can get close to the performance of the 300 using a D8 camera. If you can find one on eBay with a dead transport or wrecked lens you can get a D->A converter with TBC and DNR very cheaply.
You can only turn those things on and off and you don't get the proc amp tweaks of the 300 but if you're tight for cash might be the answer.
I used mine as a converter for about a year and even with that clients used to comment how much better the DVDs looked than the VHS tape.
Look TBCs can really clean things up a lot, and the things they do clean up are those that make encoding to mpeg-2 harder so any form of TBC will improve VHS that's even the slightest bit wobbly.

Oh, the only other thing a D8 camera will not fo is handel both PAL and NTSC.

Bob.

I currently use a Sony DCR TRV-820 D-8 to preview to monitor. I see no difference or improvment capturing through it

"Here in Canada its like $750.00 ..."

We Canadians do get ripped off, don't we? :-(
If you're a student in any way, shape or form, you can get it for $630 CDN at www.studica.ca
Not much of a savings but every bit helps.

Mike

I assume you mean capturing VHS?

Check in the menu of the camera to ensure you have TBC and DNR enabled. On good quality tapes you'll probably not see much if any difference. On older tapes you will see an improvement.

Bob.

Thanks all for the replies. The copy protection thing isn't that important to me but on occasion I've had a use for it. Thats all.