On Nov 28, 2005, at 6:00 PM, Ron Stuart wrote:
I have some old VHS tapes I would like to get on my computer, edit and
then burn to DVD. What is the best and most economical way to get them
from my VCR to my G4 Sawtooth, dual 500, 768 mb ram. I have looked at
some boxes that hook up to firewire. They are expensive though. Any
suggestions would be appreciated.
Ron
Nova Scotia
Hi Ron,
Those "boxes that hook up to FireWire" (analog to digital converters)
as you call them are the only way I know to do the job, and they do
work well (I'm using a G4 733 DA running 10.3.x). I first bought a
Miglia box (http://www.miglia.com/products/video/director2/), which
works fine feeding VHS tapes into iMovie and Final Cut Express, but it
kept burning out (repaired several times on warranty) until I got an AC
adapter for it (lesson: don't trust FireWire power alone, even if the
mfg. says it works) and one time while the Miglia was out for yet
another repair I got impatient and bought a Canopus 300 box
(http://www.canopus.com/products/ADVC300/index.php) and now like it
better than the Miglia, because as it says on that Canopus webpage the
300 model "cleans and enhances analog video input, ideal for preserving
aged videotape footage," (since in addition to VHS tapes, I am editing
and archiving a lot of very old family Hi-8 tapes. The converter fixes
various kinds of flaws in these old tapes as it converts).
These FireWire converter boxes also allow the connecting of a TV to
them so that you can watch the video going in or out of the Mac on a TV
screen, and you can also edit video using the TV instead of the little
windows that iMovie or Final Cut put on your computer monitor. Besides,
if you're planning to show your movies on TV (by burning them onto
DVDs), you need to be aware that video looks considerably different on
a TV than on a computer monitor, so you need to see how it looks on a
TV as you make your edits. Otherwise, you may have some unpleasant
surprises the first time you show your video on a TV.
The VHS tapes that these FireWire converter boxes can feed into your
Mac include commercial Hollywood movies that you would like to snip
pieces out of to add to your own home movies for one reason or another
(sometimes just for laughs) or to clean up an entire movie to make it
G-rated for family viewing, if the movie is worth the trouble to you to
edit (and both the above boxes can overcome macrovision copy protection
schemes on the way into the Mac). If the same VCR deck that feeds your
VHS tapes through the converter box into the Mac happens to have a DVD
player in it, you can use it to feed commercial DVD movies into the Mac
the same way (again, into iMovie or Final Cut or any other video
editing program). After you create or edit your video movies, you can
feed the movies right back out through the converter box to VHS tape in
a VCR again (a lot of people still don't have DVD players, but
everybody's got a VCR); in fact if you want to make a bunch of VHS copy
tapes you can chain more than one VCR together and make more than one
tape at the same time (the Miglia box even has two outputs for this),
and you can even connect the output of any VCR (singly or in such a
chain) to a TV to see how it looks on the way out.
I guess what I'm saying is that you sort of need one of these FireWire
converter boxes to get analog video such as VHS tapes into your Mac. If
you don't want to spring for a new box, haunt eBay and watch for a used
Canopus. You don't need the more expensive 300 or 500 models unless you
want or need that clean-up-old-bad-video feature. I've never seen
anything but praise from Canopus owners.
But do avoid like the plague the cheaper boxes such as the Dazzle,
Pyro, etc. analog-to-digital converters, and get FireWire not USB (the
latter is not fast enough). Check out the Apple iMovie or Final Cut
Express discussion forums
(http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=855 and
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=936) and see how many
people are tearing out their hair trying to get those cheap boxes to
work, or complaining about the crummy quality of the video they produce
if they do get them to work. The old saw about "you get what you pay
for" seems to be quite true in the quality of a FireWire video
converter box.
And by the way, either of those forums would be good places to ask the
experts about any other possible ways of getting VHS tapes into your
Mac. The people in those forums are knowledgeable and answer fast. (I
don't claim to be any expert; all I can tell you is what I found out
the hard way).
HTH,
Tom
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