Written by Paul Gorman | 03 March 2003
Posted in Hardware

Review
Installation & Documentation
Ease of use
Value for money
Price (approx)	$599 + GST
Operating System	OS X
Available from	ImagingTechnology

Having just received a video of my niece all the way from the UK, I relocated my video player next to my iMac ready to use iMovie and iDVD to convert the video into a DVD... it was only then that I realised there were no analogue inputs in my iMac! Once the blushing had subsided I did some research and eventually decided on the "prosumer" device from Canopus.

Setting up
The user manual is very sparse (8 pages) but there is not much to actually do to connect up. The device comes with a Firewire cable with 4-pin and 6-pin connectors on either end. The device itself has a 4-pin socket at the front and a 6-pin socket at the back. The large button on the top of the unit is used to switch between analogue and digital input. A number of DIP switch are on the bottom which allow various modes to be selected....

"...the ADVC-100 takes the VHS video and creates a DV stream.....the image is pretty good considering how low quality VHS really is."

• Video format: NTSC/PAL
• NTSC setup level: 0 IRE/ 7.5 IRE
• Locked audio mode: Locked/Unlocked
• Audio mode: 48kHz/16-bit / 32kHz/12-bit
• Power-on input mode: Analogue/Digital
• Input select mode: Manual/Auto.

When switched on the unit uses a very cool blue LED to indicate which input mode is being used. The status light blinks when the unit thinks it is getting a Macrovision-like signal. This causes the unit to fiddle with the video signal making it darker then lighter. After a Google search I found this can be disabled (luckily I can understand German!). I later found that same information in the ADVC-specific forum on the Canopus web site.

So, I ran a long cable from my receiver to the ADVC-100 using the tape audio out for the audio feed and one of the video outputs. The unit has the DIP switch for video format set to NTSC by default so I switched that to PAL as I was capturing a PAL video. Set the audio mode to 48Hz/16-bit and locked audio mode to locked.
Firing up iMovie2 with the unit switched off meant the project was assumed to be NTSC; with the unit switched on a PAL project was created. I was ready to go!

Sound Studio helps when wanting to input audio only from a video source

Capturing video using iMovie
iMovie believes that the ADVC-100 is a video camera and reports that the camera is connected when the unit is on. There is no way to control the ADVC-100 via iMovie which is not really surprising. So to start the process I pressed 'play' on the VCR. If you click on the play button you can see what is coming via the video input. Capturing started when I clicked on the import button and stopped when I clicked the stop button. Nothing hard about that. The image is pretty good considering how low quality VHS really is. So the ADVC-100 takes the VHS video and creates a DV stream at a resolution of 720x576 .

Audio only capture using Sound Studio
Things get more interesting if you only want to capture audio and not video. Contrary to what you would think, you still need a video signal if you want to record audio only; the signal is used as a trigger by the ADVC-100. If you have no video feed then you get no audio.

The other issue is finding an application that knows about the DV input device. Cranking up the Sound Preference pane reveals that the System does not know that there is an extra audio input; only the internal microphone is recognised. As many of the audio applications only seem to know about audio inputs from this panel they have no idea that there are more inputs available via the Firewire interface. Luckily I found a very useful application that does the right thing: Sound Studio.

It recognises that there is a DV Audio input device and gives you 3 options: First 2 channels, Second 2 channels, and Mix 4 channels. The first 2 channels are the inputs at the front of the unit; the second 2 are at the back. I have only used the 2 channel mode. In this mode the audio can be either 48kHz/16-bit or 32kHz/12-bit; when in 4-channel mixing mode the main and sub-channels are mixed at 50% each at 32kHz/12-bit.

To get the necessary video signal I connect the output from my Sky decoder directly to the ADVC-100; the audio is connected to the tape output of the receiver. This way I get the line-level inputs that are necessary to prevent audio clipping, have the ability to record audio from any source from the receiver, and have a video signal needed to trigger the device. I originally had my video recorder connected directly to the ADVC-100 but found that the audio level was too high for Sound Studio and meant the audio was clipped. Going via the receiver fixed it.

Once you have the DV file what did I do with it ?
a) captured video from home-video PAL VHS tapes and Sky decoder analogue output: create (S)VCD or DVD.

Captured audio, ready to use however you want

iMovie and Toast make a great combination. Having both allows the captured files to be saved as MPEG for the creation of VCDs. Toast installs some settings in iMovie that make the MPEG creation easy. The resulting MPG files can then be placed into a very useful application called VCD Builder which allows you to create VCDs with menus and sequences. Once finished VCD Builder can fire up Toast to burn the VCD. A very cool app! You can also create Super VCDs. Of course iDVD can also be used to create a DVD. VCDs are definitely the best option for preserving TV recordings since the resolution of the video closely matches VCD. DVD resolution is overkill! I burnt my video to DVD because my sister's DVD player couldn't handle the VCD I sent. Shame.

b) captured audio: create MP3s, and burn CDs.

The audio is saved as the default AIFF file. This is then dragged into iTunes, converted there via the Advanced Menu option into an MP3. Simple. The audio quality is excellent. There was no discernable difference between the radio broadcast and the MP3. I typically record a 6 hour show; the only real issue is the 2GB file limit in SoundStudio, so I record to video tape in NICAM stereo first then capture into 2 files onto the Mac.

Conclusions
The ADVC-100 is very good for capturing old video footage that needs to be preserved or take home videos and burn to CDR or DVD. It is easy to set up and use with very little that can go wrong other than a dirty signal making it think it has a Macrovision input and that can be fixed too. Audio capture is good too although harder to set up as you still need an arbitrary video trigger.

Review machine : iMac 800Hz 17" LCD display 512MB RAM 80GB hard drive. USB wheel mouse.