Quote:
Originally Posted by stomachmonkey
That card only outputs, it's not a capture card. Do you have FireWire on the box?
If yes and Patrick is finished with my Canopus he can send it to you next.
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I may as well be finished. I did all the tapes that were really important to me and have had some 2nd tier tapes lying around waiting and I haven't found time to copy them. It will be summer before I get them done. The problem is that this has to be done in real time, so recording 50 hours worth of tapes means you are attending the system for 50 hours. Using Premier Elements as the capture software, if there is an input glitch of any kind, it stops recording, so you need to be paying attention to it all the time. There is a program that worked for me once (Vivo or something like that) that just started recording and kept choking down data through tape jumps and bad recording until you tell it to stop. Unfortunately, it only worked once and then started returning errors on startup.
That's just to software side.
The tapes I was copying were 20-30 years old and I found that they wouldn't stand up to being stopped and started by the tape player. In some cases the tape got would around the capstan and I had to take the tape player apart and unwind it and often patch the tape back together. I ended up cycling all the tapes from beginning to end and back to the beginning using a cordless drill and a driver made from a 5/8 wing bit. This way all the player had to to was start from the beginning and play a tape that had already been "limbered up." I still ended up taking some of the cassettes apart to repair tapes.
For it's part, the Canopus worked splendidly. It allowed me to copy Macrovision protected tapes to my computer, where I cleaned them up with Premier, and then burned them to DVD. I would only do this if the tape wasn't available on DVD or I couldn't find better software, because the hassle of copying using Premeir as the capture software is not worth the $$ savings of buying a DVD copy.
What worked best for me for non-protected tapes was a Toshiba VCR/DVD player recorder that recorded non-protected tapes straight to DVD without me watching over it. It was easy then to load the DVD onto the computer and edit/clean up/combine the DVDs in Premier, then burn a final DVD.
To whom should I send the Canopus?