Other external solutions for analogue->digital video

Other external solutions for analogue->digital video

Posted Dec 13, 2007 7:49 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Analog -> IEEE 1394 by brugolsky
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

my handheld camcorder provides the ability to connect an analog input,

Sigh, here in Europe the analog input is usually missing from consumer grade camcorders, even when present in the same model sold outside Europe, because of a certain stupid protectionistic tarif.

But I have seen some external analogue-digital video converter boxes that attach to USB or Firewire. Does anyone have experience using such devices with Linux?

One very easy solution is to use a recording DVD deck. These are quite affordable these days, and Linux video software has no problem in reading the resulting discs. They do perform a lossy MPEG2 compression, but when you use the maximum quality setting of the deck, it is unlikely to matter, since that quality is probably still better than what your analogue camcorder generates (unless you have serious professional equipment). I have used this method for digitizing my SVHS-C tapes.

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The acedvio card from canopus works fine over firewire with dvgrab. (A$500, though - they used
to make cheaper products.) The "--format dv2" option is a good choice. Grabbed video+audio in
DV format is excellent quality, but you need to allow space for about 12 Gbyes/hour captured.
Kino works ok to edit and convert to lower bitrate mpeg2 format for DVD.

I'll be interested to know how long the grumpy editor takes to edit his captured footage. I
believe the standard conversion factor is 1 hour of editing per minute of finished product.