In need of advice/recommendations!

[thwclw]

I'm just starting to figure out what I will need to convert some old VHS and HI-8 tapes to DVD's.

I own the Pinnacle Studio 11 software and have an old Avermedia PCI capture card in my Core 2 Duo machine (fairly fast machine) and have been using that hooked up to my old VHS deck - it seems to work, but when I make the movies from Pinnacle, it can take forever if you use the video noise reduction or other cleanup tools available. I guess it has to encode the captured AVI files to MPEG2 and that takes time too.

My questions are:

If I bought the AVDC300 and hooked it up to my machine via firewire, what do I end up with as a file on the PC? Is it an AVI, MPEG2 or what?

What are the steps in the conversion process and how long does it take?

Is there software bundled with the AVDC300 that will allow me to go straight to DVD?

Will Pinnacle recognize it as a capture source like it does my Avermedia PCI card?

Sorry to be so stupid, but I'm looking for something that is going to give me excellent quality DVD's that doesn't take huge amounts of time to do since I have about 100 or so tapes I need to convert!

Thanks!

Terry

[THoff]

The ADVC-300 is a DV device similar to a MiniDV camcorder or MiniDV / S-VHS deck. It will only output DV streams, and my recommendation is to save that as an AVI file before you edit and transcode in preparation for burning a DVD.

There are programs that can transcode from DV to MPEG2 on-the-fly, but this will result in lower quality than you can get by performing these steps separately.

The only software that comes with the ADVC-300 is the "Picture Controller 300" utility to adjust the audio and video processing filters. You can also use buttons on the ADVC-300 to make adjustments, but using the utility is much easier.

[thwclw]

Thanks, I think I understand now!

It's really just a replacement for my Avermedia PCI video in card (except it conditions the signal for a better product ahead of the digital stream).

Thanks again!