Quick little home video editing project...(warning: LONG!)


Susan had a few hours of home videos on VHS tape that we wanted to have on DVD. We found a coupon for $25 off at some VHS->DVD transfer place nearby but it was still going to cost ~$200 to make the transfer. I figured I could do it myself cheaper and have some fun in the process, so I stood at the edge of the home video editing cliff and jumped, not knowing how deep the chasm could be.

Video Capture

I have an aging Macintosh G4 (500 MHz cpu, 512 MB memory) that I felt was up to the task at hand. All I needed was a way to capture the video and I could use iMovie (included with every Mac) to do any editing that was necessary. I scanned the local CompUSA and Fry's video capture solutions looking for something that would work. There are lots of options, most of them USB based, and some of them even work with a Mac. But if you look closely at the specs for most of these sub-$100 solutions you'll see the maximum resolution is only 320x240. I wasn't going to be happy with that level of quality.

After a little research on the web I decided the Canopus ADVC50 would be perfect. It is a little PCI card that converts analog video input into a DV stream on 1394/Firewire output. The Mac has 1394/Firewire inputs and the Canopus card would show up as a DV camera on the 1394/Firewire connection. Since iMovie is designed to work with DV cameras this meant that iMovie would "just work" with the Canopus card, a definite benefit of their product. Plus the buzz on the newsgroups seemed to confirm that the Canopus products did the job well. I ordered the ADVC50 from pcconnection.com for $188, feeling good that I was under the $200 price point I would have paid someone else to transfer the VHS tapes to DVD for me.

Disk Drive

Video capture and editing was going to use up some disk space. The same day I ordered the Canopus ADVC50 I also ordered a new Seagate Barracuda 160 GB disk drive from newegg.com for $134. This cost doesn't count against the project total, I reasoned, because I would get to use the disk after the VHS->DVD transfer project. I can always use more disk space.

iDVD

With the ADVC50 and the disk drive on the way I started to think about the next steps of the project. I was looking forward to playing with iMovie for editing the video, but I realized that I didn't have a copy of iDVD to burn the final video to DVD. iDVD is part of iLife, Apple's nice suite of easy-to-use products iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, and iTunes. iMovie, iPhoto, and iTunes are all free downloads from Apple's web site but the only way to get iDVD is to buy iLife in the store. I bought iLife at CompUSA for about $50.

New Graphics Card

I installed iDVD and began to play around with it. I tried a couple of times to run through the iDVD tutorial but each time my system hung, requiring a rare MacOS X reboot to unstick it. My Mac is going on 4 years old now but it still met the minimum requirements for iDVD easily. I browsed the Apple iDVD discussions. There were lots of people having various difficulties with iDVD but no one with my particular hanging problem. Then I remembered I had a similar hanging problem with iPhoto during slideshows so on a hunch that my iDVD hangs were related to my iPhoto hangs I browsed over to the iPhoto discussions. One long thread about hanging slideshows seemed to show a correlation between iPhoto hangs and the ATI Rage 128 Pro graphics card, the same graphics card I had in my G4. I found a used ATI Radeon 8500 for $119 from bootastic.com on Ebay and Bought It Now. After I replaced that ATI Rage 128 Pro with the ATI Radeon 8500 iDVD hangs were gone, and iPhoto hangs were gone too! As a bonus I got Quartz Extreme enabled on my Mac.

Finally

At last, I could capture the VHS video using the Canopus ADVC50 onto my new Seagate Barracude 160 GB disk drive. iMovie worked well to edit the movie, and iDVD worked well to burn the DVDs.

Whew.

I could have paid someone else to transfer the VHS videos to DVD for about $200. Instead I got a Canopus ADVC50 video capture card for $188, a disk drive for $134, iDVD for $50, and a new graphics card for $119. Plus $15 for a 5-pack of blank DVD-Rs. Total cost for the project: $506.

Conclusion

I'm extremely pleased with the Canopus ADVC50. It has performed flawlessly in my Mac G4 and worked nicely with iMovie. If you have a Mac, or 1394/Firewire input, I would recommend Canopus.

iMovie and iDVD are really great products too, but they are not as easy to use as they should be given their target audience. They each have their own quirks which you have to discover and work around. But they get the job done, and I'm sure there is no better solution for the price.

Posted: Tue - November 18, 2003 at 05:14 PM        

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