There are many A/D converter boxes that interface between legacy equipment and your computer with a wide range of prices and features. Will you be using short bits from your analog tapes, or do you want to convert everything? Will this be part of your every-day video editing system? (Are you currently shooting an analog format with no plans to upgrade?) Do you need to support balanced audio (XLR) in? Do you want the ability to move digital video back to an analog media? One thing to take into consideration when shopping for an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter is the amount of footage you need to convert.
Which means plan an upgrade strategy for all your existing digital footage and, when practical, keep important analog masters. The format you digitize into your computer today might not be useful tomorrow. Digital playback and recording requires microprocessors and, as digital technology is advancing at such an incredible rate, formats change rapidly. You can try outputting audio tracks on your non-linear editor at various sampling rates and see for yourself when you begin to notice a degradation in sound quality.Īnalog requires much less sophisticated equipment than digital – Edison made his first analog recorder out of little more than a pin, a horn, and a bit of tin foil. Digital can be duplicated again and again without error each copy is exactly the same as the original.īut digital’s strength can also be its weakness – if the sampling rate is too slow – imagine a digital clock that displays only hours and minutes but not seconds – analog media can be more accurate. Imagine going into a room, looking at an analog clock, then manually setting another clock based on the first, each time you do this, there will be a slight error in one direction or another. “Generational loss” occurs each time an analog tape is duplicated because the values are not read back exactly the same way every time. Looking at a digital clock, everybody agrees on the number. An analog clock is one that measures value across a continual scale, the hands move from “1” to “2” by proceeding through all the space in between where as in digital, where things are expressed by a discrete value, “1” turns directly into “2”.īecause copying analog values is inexact (you look at the clock and see five minutes past three, someone else might read it as four, another as six) each time copies are made, errors are introduced. The easiest example of the difference between analog and digital is the most familiar – a clock.
You can use any analog source (VHS deck, camcorder, DVD player, etc.) and would typically use iMovie or Final Cut Express to capture your video on a Mac.We use the terms “analog” and “digital” a lot, some people may be unclear as to what they mean and why one is better than the other is. If you have basically clean analog video, any of these units will be fine.
bidirectional conversion input/output connectors and the software that comes with the ADVC-300. The primary differences are support for one-way vs. I do not believe there is any difference in the internal conversion hardware. I've used these things for years and they all work great. Helpful in cleaning up particularly bad analog videos.
The ADVC-300 is also bidirectional and includes composite, s-video and component video i/o (D1 connector) inputs & outputs stereo audio inputs & outputs Firewire input & output and software that enables you to tweak its video settings. The ADVC-110 is bidirectional (meaning you can both capture and output through it - this is a very good way to monitor your video during production as you can see the actual quality on a monitor/TV rather than just your computer screen, which has limited capability to show you the actual video quality.) It includes composite & s-video inputs and outputs stereo audio inputs & outputs Firewire input & output.
It includes composite & s-video inputs and stereo audio inputs.