budget $300 machine: pentium4 2.2+1gb rdram pc600+40gb ata133 hd I want to capture movies from sat and burn them on dvd at list at the vhs quality of the rental videos (wicth is not so bad in my opinion) and at the same time I have an panasonic pal video camera that I want to capture and convert to ntsc so I can view it on my tv. WHAT CAPTURE DIVICE I SHOULD BUY ? AND WHAT SOFTWARE IS RECOMENDED ???
Well For Video Capture you should have more Hard Drive Space and Preferably as a Seperate drive...For the best Quality I would get a Analogue/Digital Converter like the Canopus ADVC-100 or ADVC-50 which would capture to High Quality DV Format that you can then edit and then encode to Mpeg2/DVD with a High Quality mpeg encoder and then author them to DVD... Another Route that is Good because you are Captureing from a Stalite System is to use a Satalite DVB card to Actually Record the Satalite Signal Itself which is Broadcasted in a Mpeg2 Transport Stream so there is no differance between what you see on TV and what you capture..There are Problems with this method because there are allmost allways Sync problems and the Resolution that they capture to is not a DVD Compliant Resolution so the Files would need to be Re-Encoded to the Proper DVD resolution which takes up time and degrades the Quality because of the resizeing to DVD resolution and Re-encodeing which all defeates the Purpose of Captureing from a Satalite DVB Card...There are also Hardware Mpeg2 encoder USB Boxes and PCI Cards but the Ones that are of a High enough Quality Cost too Much and the USB Boxes don"t seem to be Perfected yet and there is not software that works with them accept the One that comes with them...You can use a Simple TV Capture Card ,and just Plug the S-Video Output from the Satalite reciever into the Tv Capture Cards S-Video input and capture useing Most Software programs..The Newest TV Cards with the 10Bit decoder Chip Capture Pretty good Quality Video, these Cards include the "MSI TV @nywere" and the "ASUS TV Card" and "LeadTech WinFast Deluxe" ,These Cards can be found for as Low as $50 US ...There are also Capture cards that Come attached to Graphic Cards like the ATI All In Wonder" Cards ,The Newer Cards Like the AIW Radeon 9000 to 9800 all have a Very Good quality Capture Chip and Captures very Good Quality Video and the Software that comes with it is Quite good and the Graphics for gameing is exelent ....Overall For the Best Quality the canopus ADVC-100 ($250US) or the ADVC-50 ($175US) Will Probably Produce the Best Quality as Long as you use a High Quality Mpeg encoder to encode the DV Files to Mpeg2 for DVD Like Tmpgenc or CCE or MainConcept Encoder.... As For your Video Camera "Yes" you can Capture your Files in Pal DV AVI Format and then you can use something like the "Advanced DV NTSC/Pal Converter" to convert the Pal DV Files to NTSC or if you can get ahold of a Copy of "Canopus Procoder" it can convert your Pal DV AVI files to NTSC Mpeg2 DVD Files but there are Not many programs that can properly convert Pal NTSC Formats but these 2 Can do it Properly....Well Good Luck Cheers
From what I know it is Basicly the Same thing and I know it costs about the same as the ADVC-100 but the ADVC-50 is Quite a Bit cheaper...I have no Personal experience with the ADVC-1394 but I do with the others so I can"t tell you much about it....Good Luck
