Analog AV Capture Sequel...
While I am pleased to report that Movie Maker and Windows XP Media Center 2005 have been responding within specified parameters, I am displeased to find that the most of host of 3rd party media capture products I've tried since have not lived up to expectations...
At CompUSA, I purchased Pinnacle Systems' 9.0 Studio Plus and AV/DV capture PCI card and rapidly returned it for the following reasons:
- The MPEG-2 and AVI files it captured from my analog VHS-C tapes were not acceptable by Movie Maker2.1, Windows Media 10, or Adobe Premiere 1.0 Elements on my system (out of sync audio, frozen video, hung apps, and even blue-screens etc.)
- The Studio 9.x app had an excessively "trialware" look and feel to it - Every feature I wanted was trying to dig me further into the hole...
- The Studio 9.x app had an excessive number of bugs ( "cannot open files", outright crashes, and XP DEP protection exceptions) in dealing with the QuicktimePro-produced and NeroVision Express-produced AVI and MPG files I was working with, not to mention other core functionality gaps that quickly displeased me with my purchase
I then returned it and tried out Adaptec's VideOh! PCI product: Mui non bueno:
- The capture steams were MPEG-2 and pretty much indecipherable by the capture programs I was trying (NeroVision Express 3.0 and Microsoft Windows Media-based products) and though it appeared to be able to capture to MPG fine through the bundled SonicDVD apps, the resulting output hung any other app that I tried to run them through when captured at or near the hardware's advertised capacity
Last up: An inexpensive video capture PCI card from Avermedia purchased from Fry's:
- This is another soon-to-be-returned item whose shortcomings include blue-screening whenever tested apps attempt to capture from the device at any rate above the default 320x screen aperture size...
I must say that the Adobe Premiere\Photoshop Elements bundle I picked up for a reasonable price has been a saving grace through this project, and that Windows XP Media Center 2005 has been very resilient through all of these software configuration changes on the system but I am still in search of an inexpensive and robust hardware solution for turning my analog video tapes into robust and high-quality digital video formats - Suggestions welcome!
