I spent a bit of time trying to figure out if I should buy a digital camcorder or a video capture device that would let me use my existing analog Hi-8 Sony Handycam. There were some strong arguments for buying a digital camcorder, primarily that it was more likely to produce a crisper and clearer image without having to do the analog to digital transformation.
But when I started looking at the choices of digital camcorders, there seemed to be the following options:
1. Really cheap ($100 to $150) digital camcorders that record to SDRAM cards and produce what many reviewers said was really poor quality video.
2. Somewhat more expensive ($280 to $380) digital camcorders that record to SDRAM cards and produce really beautiful video--but are limited to about an hour or so of video storage before you have to stop and put in another card. For many applications, that's not a problem. I have some time-lapse video requirements that make this impractical.
3. Digital camcorders in the $600 and up range that record to hard disk, and can record several hours of video at a time.
What was behind door number 1 wasn't worth my time. Door number 3 was just too expensive for what I am doing. (This has been an expensive month for new tires and car repairs.) Door number 2 would be attractive--except that using my existing analog camcorder costs me nothing, gives me several hours of video without changing tapes, and the video capture gadget cost me $75 from Newegg.com.
I've bought the ADS Tech product before--but I was trying to run it from Windows98, and it never worked very reliably. I installed it on my son's Windows ME box--and while it worked the first I installed it, he was constantly getting his PC infected with all the viruses that teenagers tend to download, and the second installation of the capture software did not work.
Anyway, I'm pleased with the latest version. It consists of a little box that either takes an S-Video or three RCA plugs, and uses a USB connector to talk to your PC. There is both a standalone capture program (CapWiz) that takes incoming analog video and converts it into an MPEG2 file, and Ulead Video Studio 9 SE, which can either do the video capture itself, or use the file that CapWiz produces.
Ulead Video Studio isn't Adobe Premiere, but it has a few features in it that Windows Movie Maker does not, including the one that really matters to me: control over playback speed. (Windows Movie Maker does give you the ability to double or halve the playback speed, but you have to drag the effect to each individual segment on the timeline, and 1/2 and 2x are pretty coarse adjustments.)
I would have preferred time-lapse video capture capability (the ability to grab every sixth frame, for example, to save disk space), but this is an adequate alternative. Along with many other editing features, you can create a video output file at any speed from 10% to 1000% of the captured frame rate, so you can do either slow motion or speeded up video. This won't do if you want to do time-lapse video of a flower opening--but your video camera probably doesn't have enough storage capacity to do this real-time anyway. (And you can do a 1000% speedup, save the file, then import it, and repeat the 1000% speedup.)
So far, everything works pretty well. The final saving of the video output file to either MPEG2 or WMV (Windows Media Video) takes a long time, even on this very quick laptop that I have--but I rather expect that, considering the enormous amount of processing it takes to calculate all the base frames and delta frames. To my surprise, WMV format manages to be both much more compact than MPEG2 and better image quality!
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