Canopus ADVC-100 Advanced Digital Video Converter, Analog / DV

H E L L O A G A I N A M A Z O N F A N S E V E R Y W H E R E!!!I have a half of gazillion video tapes around here in various formats from VHS, 8, Hi-8, Digital-8, MiniDV ...its crazy.A couple of my newer cameras have the 1394 'Firewire' connection, as does my Lenovo T420 Laptop, so connecting them to the computer and digitizing the videos isn't hard at all; the trouble was with the older formats.Researching a simple yet effective means to do so was a quite the task; it seems for every good review I would read of the devices that plugged into your computer via USB was another one said the device sucked; basically it seemed to be a crap shoot.It was while I was trouble shooting a problem I was having getting media from my Panasonic Mini DV camcorder onto the computer (turned out to be a bad cable) that I stumbled across a name I had not heard before yet seemed to be very popular among its devotee's "Canopus" by Grass Valley. It seems so obscure among the general consumer that if you are reading this review I am guessing you either know or discovered this yourself.The most common model I found people using was the ADVC-110. Doing a eBay search I found quite a number of them being offered; all used, many just the little converter box without any cables, literature or anything else yet still commanding prices of $100 or more; that tells you something.And yes, where as you can get pretty much any other consumer grade video converter device for around $60 or less you will more than likely spend more for these; because they are so reliable.This model, the ADVC-100 is an earlier model with a separate power supply; the 110 gets its power from the Firewire connection and has an option for a power supply. This model also has an extra Audio connection the 110 apparently lacks.This particular one I bought was lightly used in box, came with probably everything that it originally shipped with all nicely tucked and packed in the original box.NOTES: - There are little switches on the bottom of the device; it will work for NTSC or PAL - pay particular attention to which of the NTSC selections you choose; there are two. I had an issue when I first tried using it and discovered that the wrong NTSC switch was activated. - Whether you get the ADVC-100, ADVC-110, or the big brother ADVC-300 with its special extra magic to enhance your videos (around $300 on eBay) YOU WILL NEED TO HAVE A FIREWIRE IEEE-1394 CONNECTION ON YOUR COMPUTER. This is not a USB device. The older USB 2.0 standard is much slower than Firewire; which is probably why people have less trouble with dropouts when using this device. The only time I have had drop outs was because of a damaged tape or a burp in the camcorder. - If you are using a PC desktop computer you often can just add a Firewire card to your computer; PC laptops can be a bit more tricky, but if you have an enterprise class computer, made for businesses, and it has a PCMCIA card slot, you can find Firewire adapters here on Amazon that will fit in there and then use that. - Also know that just because you are taking your old analog videos and putting them into a digital format you can not expect them to now be high definition; they can only be as good as the original source material; and their imperfections can really show up on a high definition screen.Now that I have been getting these old tapes onto my computer I am having fun editing them; I am using Sony Movie Studio Platinum Suite 12 which has a little learning curve but is not difficult to use and has a huge fan base with a ton of support videos on the internet. As of this writing Version 13 is now out and you can get V12 for a steal.Have a Magical Day!

Used product, did not work at all, tried to contact seller who never wrote back. Either knew it didn't work or didn't care.

The unit arrived with all the parts shown in the picture and has been functioning great.

Following my order of the ADVC-100 I found many disturbing things on the internet. Most users had difficulties capturing analog to MPEG2 for burning onto DVD. Don't let yourself be scared off. Fear mongers stating that the converter captures DV files which then have to be converted to MPEG2 aren't using the right interface software. The ADVC-100 is a stand alone external unit without a software suite of its own and relies on whatever captures software you choose. I could just be lucky but both My WinProducer and my Nero Burning software detect the device instantly and allow choices of AVI, DV or MPEG2 format for file capture.Granted, having an external device may not be as convenient as a VIVO internal card, but compared to other external capture boxes the ADVC-100 is tiny and unobtrusive. Better yet, it's IEEE Firewire compliant as opposed to the 1.0 and 2.0 USB connections that for the most part fall short with frame droppings and miss-synced audio during capture.If you're looking for a straight forward plug and play unit this is it. Just make sure that you have a capture card with Firewire input capabilities such as the Sound Blaster Audigy series before purchasing this product.

I received it yesterday. It was really well maintained and had no signs of scratches. I tried it last night using Final Cut Pro X on a MacBook Pro with Intel i5 2.3MHz and 16MB RAM. I just plugged the RCA cables from the VCR, connected the fire-wire cable, the AC/DC adapter, and turned it on and… voila! The video signal appeared on my laptop. No need of settings and head scratching. Just plug and play. I recorded a video of about 1:30 hours and did it all at once without signal dropping. Very happy!

They don't make items like this anymore at a reasonable price. It works perfect with fire wire on older Mac Pro desktop.

I think this is an exceptional solution to the problem many of us have with analog video tapes to convert. I originally bought this to use with my older, slower PC -- but I replaced my PC with a screamer (and USB 2.0 and Firewire) before I really got a chance to use this. So I can't tell you how well this box does in compensating for older, slower hard drives and a slower CPU.However, with the new system, this box appears to my video editing software (Ulead VideoStudio 7) as a DV camera, so it's simple to edit.The bad news is that all of my video cpature software ASSUMES this is a DV camera, so you get all sorts of spurious information onscreen -- like DV controls, or DV timecodes, etc.If you are aware of the fact that those controls won't work, or that the timecode is meaningless, this unit works like a charm to capture your analog video, package it as DV and deliver it to your PC with little or no dropped frames and generally rock solid video/audio synch (BTW -- if the audio gets unsynched, the only guaranteed solution I've had is to restart the capture from a clean spot on the videotape -- no snow, no tracking errors).

I must say this product is exactly as it says. I simply took it out of the package(Which I recieved in less than 24 hours with free shipping from Amazon.com) and plugged in the cables and went with it. It connected to Movie Maker 2 and I was off.I definitely recomend this to ayone looking to put old vhs movies onto DVD's for safe storage.