[tgrundke]

I'm going to be purchasing an analog/DV capture card or external box and I'm looking for some advice.

Foremost, any suggestions on units? Second of all, are there any cards that provide for MPEG-2 compression 'on-the-fly', or do most all of them require you to copy the video to your harddrive as a DV stream and then let the Mac do the MPEG-2 conversion (to put the video on DVD).

Any suggestions and comments would be very helpful. Thanks in advance.

[Mark E]

i myself have a canopus advc-100 for this, and it works great. if you hunt around online you should find plenty of reviews saying it beats other comparable units, such as the dazzle hollywood bridge, in terms of features and video quality.

http://www.canopus.com/US/products/a...m_advc-100.asp

if you have a PCI slot you can get a unit that's much cheaper but exactly the same, feature-wise..

http://www.canopus.com/US/products/a...m_advc-100.asp

i don't have any experience with the hardware mpeg-2 encoder boxes, but canopus also make those:

http://www.canopus.com/US/Products/i..._2_capture.asp

i think the problem with these units is, they're handy for capturing, obviously, but you don't get much in the way of editing facilities as you're doing your encoding straight away.

think of it as encoding an audio recording directly to MP3 instead of recording it to WAV, making edits, and then encoding to MP3.

hope that was helpful

-Mark

[tgrundke]

Mark:

Thanks so much for the information, this is exactly the input I was looking for!

Originally posted by Mark E:
i myself have a canopus advc-100 for this, and it works great. if you hunt around online you should find plenty of reviews saying it beats other comparable units, such as the dazzle hollywood bridge, in terms of features and video quality.

http://www.canopus.com/US/products/a...m_advc-100.asp

if you have a PCI slot you can get a unit that's much cheaper but exactly the same, feature-wise..

http://www.canopus.com/US/products/a...m_advc-100.asp

i don't have any experience with the hardware mpeg-2 encoder boxes, but canopus also make those:

http://www.canopus.com/US/Products/i..._2_capture.asp

i think the problem with these units is, they're handy for capturing, obviously, but you don't get much in the way of editing facilities as you're doing your encoding straight away.

think of it as encoding an audio recording directly to MP3 instead of recording it to WAV, making edits, and then encoding to MP3.

hope that was helpful

-Mark

[tr]

Originally posted by tgrundke:
I'm going to be purchasing an analog/DV capture card or external box and I'm looking for some advice.

Foremost, any suggestions on units? Second of all, are there any cards that provide for MPEG-2 compression 'on-the-fly', or do most all of them require you to copy the video to your harddrive as a DV stream and then let the Mac do the MPEG-2 conversion (to put the video on DVD).

Any suggestions and comments would be very helpful. Thanks in advance.

there's also the ADS InstantDVD for Mac. captures in mpeg-1/2 format in real time. the included Pixela software allows you to edit the mpeg's, and also create and burn DVD's with menus, buttons, and such using and iDVD like interface. the software also allows the use of burning via external fw DVD-R drives.

tr