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x&trick

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 23, 2008
12
0
(Of course, feel free to point me to prior posts whose titles might not have conveyed to me the relevance of their contents.)

Using the A3 I plan to get for a vast collection might burn it out and not provide optimal quality, according to an A2 review. (Could I just use it as as pass-through device and let iMovie do the work? If permitted, I take it that would defeat the A3 file size limit.)

I don't have a camcorder but would like one someday, and will consider its functionality in this area when choosing one. I read that they may have better audio sync than the ADVC but that NTSC ones don't index black as well.

While the 300 has better adjustment features, I don't really want to spend a lot of time with those for the varying conditions of all my tapes, many of which contain different sources recorded years apart from one segment to the next. Most have not been heavily played so should not be worn. Some recordinngs have slightly fuzzy reception, some start or stop in the middle of older ones they were recorded over. Nearly all are EP (SLP).

A main concern of mine is recordings stopping due to dropped frames. I want to start my 6- or 8-hour tapes when I go to bed, knowing they'll be converted nonstop, and parse the DV for episodes, stills and sound bites at my leisure. AVI would be a preferred final format due to its compatibility (love my standalone Philips DVP642 for this--wish I could play AVIs in my friends' living rooms without bringing anything but the disks).

My PowerBook G4 has FileValut enabled; will digitizing (preferably with iMovie as it's free) eat the disk-space memory, or is it sufficient to have 100 GB free for the DV? Does it render in real time, or require extra?

Finally, if I do settle for a solution which might result in out-of-sync audio, is it hard to nudge the whole audio track a bit in the video editor?

Thanks for all the puzzle pieces to come!
 
Hi x&trick,

The 300 would be the way to go. The 55 simply doesn't have the right tools to help stabilize your tapes during the transfer.

With the 300, you never have to worry about audio/video sync issues either. I've never had a problem with mine.

Don't worry about spending the money. Transfer devices usually have a high resale value so you can always turn around and sell it when you're done for a good chunk of what you paid.

cheers,
Keebler
 
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