This just makes me wish I didn't sell my MiniDV camcorder a few months back. The Elgato is going to set me back $175 for only a few videos. I don't see how much use I'd get out of it otherwise. I have a TiVo and cable cards. Couldn't even use it to capture TV at all. Ugggh.
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Converting VHS to DVD w/o Firewire?
- Thread starter fishniw
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This just makes me wish I didn't sell my MiniDV camcorder a few months back. The Elgato is going to set me back $175 for only a few videos. I don't see how much use I'd get out of it otherwise. I have a TiVo and cable cards. Couldn't even use it to capture TV at all. Ugggh.
I've been using a DataVideo DAC-100 analog-DV converter that was cheaper than some other devices successfully for years. I recently purchased a Toshiba D-VR7 VHS/DVD recorder to replace the crappy Samsung unit I bought all too recently (OMG it doesn't display seconds for tape position) and I love it. Recently I was having problems converting a crappy VHS tape for work (it kept kicking iMovie HD to blue screen for a second when hitting wrinkled portions of the tape) and I was pleased to find another work-flow to work around this and it worked very well. I dubbed the VHS tape to DVD in the VCR/DVD recorder (no blue-screen with this, only momentary hiccup in audio/video) and then used Toast 9 to convert from DVD to DV stream while importing directly into iMovie. So this is a method to convert without purchasing a converter that uses one less conversion process?
So now I'm thinking about "all those VHS tapes" that I have yet to convert and all of a sudden the idea of not using my MBP and the converter for all this and instead using my new VCR/DVD recorder seems very attractive indeed. Just get all the tapes onto DVD before too many more years pass and then worry about any editing later on, if ever 🙂
Cheers!
Glen
robanga
macrumors 68000
A very interesting idea for old VHS tapes, then you will have both the DVD as a raw archive and the files on your computer for editing etc.
I was just in our warehouse store yesterday and there were no less than three DVD/VHS recorders for sale at very good prices.
So I wrote that rubbish and then tried to recreate it and realized that what I actually did was use Toast 9 to save the DVD as a QuickTime movie, which I then imported into iMovie HD. Tonight I also tried saving it as QuickTime DV file, but oddly enough this larger file did not look as good, at least on the part where a scanned illustration was presented in the movie.
Sorry for my poor memory on that!
Cheers!
Glen
Hello, sorry to bring this thread back up again but I keep putting off buying the elgato. For VHS is usb really going to effect the video quality. I mean VHS are usually not the greatest anyway. Am I going to notice a difference when i get it into iMovie?
I just did a bunch of VHS-C tapes to DVD with the EyeTV 250 plus and it worked great.
If you only need to do a tiny bit of editing, you can burn right to DVD with no transcoding. Find my FAQ in this thread.
Otherwise, the only downside to the EyeTV is that all your video ends up in MPEG2 and you have to transcode it before going to iMovie etc.
i keep putting buying this thing off but I'm about just about ready. Do I need to get the 250 plus or the hybrid?
thanks
thanks
250 plus has hardware encoding so uses hardly any processor; hybrid makes your system processor do all the work.
Looks good. I highly recommend you check out my walkthrough on making quick DVDs from analogue sources. The eyeTV for example encodes straight to mpeg2 in hardware so if all the editing you need to do is a little trimming you can burn DVDs quite quickly without having to re-encode. I think the toast editor is more or less the same as the eyeTV editor.
Scroll down to post #12 here.
Scroll down to post #12 here.