troubles with advc-55

[marcopet]

hi, just new on this forum. writing from Italy.
I have a brand new 55, bought yesterday. the goal is to convert a lot of Hi8 tapes into digital. I already had an old pinnacle board (studio8), but I was convinced that canopus 55 is better in terms of quality results.....
well, files from pinnacle are better than 55!!!!! I do not understand where I am wrong. There are no specific setting!
I could send two very short videos to someone expert to show what I mean, maybe he can give some suggestion...

second question: how can I hear audio while converting? Audio is present in the converted video, but there is no audio while monitoring conversion.
By now I use ms video maker and studio 11.

thanks a lot, marco

[GrassValley_BH]

Which Pinnacle board is this? Is it a DV board, or an analog capture board?

If it's a DV board, it may be applying some blur to the image, which will result in a softer image that appears less noisy, especially if the source was noisy.

If it's an AV board, it may not be compressing to DV, so it may be less-compressed and therefore provide a better image.

[marcopet]

thankyou brandon. I do not know what kind of board it is. I bought it 4 yrs ago, bundle with studio8. Board has a firewire input on board and analog plugs (composite/s-video/audio) on a remote desk top box connected with the board.
Well, anyway everything works, I am only a little bit disappointed with 55, where canopus claims to deliver high quality. nothing more.

the other question was if I can hear audio while capturing. I can see video but not audio, even if it is present in the final conversion.

thanks again, you all are a wonderful community. marco

[kbosward]

The ADVC *should* be better than the Pinnacle breakout box. I had the same Pinnacle box and there was definitely an improvement using an ADVC300 (which has same internal codec as ADVC55).

In the end I uninstalled the Pinnacle box (and drivers) as I found unexplained problems with getting the ADVC300 recognised on my PC every time I plugged it in.

Are you using the same application to view the DV files captured with the Pinnacle and ADVC?

Are you using S-video connection from your Hi8 camera?

Regarding audio, the only capture program I have found that previews audio as well as video is the shareware Scenalyzer. But it's not an issue for me as I just turn the sound up on the camera while capturing.

Ken.

[GrassValley_BH]

Not seeing your video source, I can't say for certain but I suspect what you're seeing is smoothing that's making the video look better in this case.

For example, especially with recorded TV, there's a good deal of noise in the signal. The smoothing adds a slightly blur which makes the noise less apparent. However, if you have a crisp input signal (especially S-Video), the smoothing will actually hurt the video because it makes it soft and lessens the edge definitions.

If you have a PC with a graphics card with TV-out, or even a game console, you can capture the same source and check those against each other. I highly suspect you'll find the Pinnacle capture comes in looking more blurry" compared to the ADVC's capture.