VHS Archiving with the iMac and Canopus ADVC-100

1. Introduction

Now I'll be the first to say that I'm a newbie in the world of video editing and video production. My pal Dave is the authority in Mac related video questions within WhiningDog so I'll leave it to him to answer the really tough questions about video editing and video related applications for the Mac. I'm here today to present to you a view of how a newbie in video editing used the iMac to capture video, turn it into a quicktime file and then ultimately burn it onto a DVD-R for playback purposes on most DVD home players.

1.1 My Initial Premise

Last September, HBO introduced a wonderful series called "Band of Brothers" that aired over the span of 9 weeks with 10 episodes. It was based on Stephen Ambrose's book of which it shared the same title with, and chronicled the lives of the men of Easy Company in the 506. Over the years, I've slowly become a WWII buff so when the show aired, I made sure to watch and tape each episode. However, my own VHS collection had grown over the years and most of it was fairly useless stuff these days. There were however some things in my collection that I wanted to keep around but the quality of the tape would surely degrade over time. So with Band of Brothers, I really wanted to get a copy of the show from VHS into something permanent like a DVD. Yes I knew that HBO would surely come out with a DVD version of their original series but that's not really the point is it? I wanted to see if this whole notion of archiving videos was easy to do under the iMac and more importantly, under OS X. AND yes I could have directly captured the show straight to the iMac when it first came out but well, I didn't.

So the goal was set: Take the Band of Brothers video collection that I had on VHS and transfer them to my OS X box and burn them onto a DVD-R. For this article, I'll show what I did to a 20 second clip from episode 2 of that series.

2. Equipment

But first, let me spend some time outlining the equipment that I used for this project. I wanted to keep in mind that any equipment I would use should NOT be too expensive. (Of course that is all subjective so it's really up to you ultimately how much you want to spend on something) You have to remember that I'm approaching this from a total newbie point of view. I have NO experience with high end video equipment so I'm going to try and work with low cost equipment (besides the iMac of course). As it stood, all I needed was a system, a capture device, some video cables, a firewire cable, some DVD-R blank discs and some creative talent.

2.1 System

The base computer used was an iMac 800 MHz G4 system. I purchased this system when it was first unveiled early this year and also before Apple raised the price 100 dollars. For those who are fairly new to the Mac scene, here are some quick technical specifications of the iMac 800.

• 800-MHz PowerPC G4 processor with Velocity Engine
• 256K on-chip level 2 cache at full processor speed
• 100MHz system bus
• 512MB of SDRAM installed

• 60GB Ultra ATA hard disk drive
• SuperDrive (combination DVD-R/CD-RW drive; writes DVD-R discs at 2x speed, reads DVDs at 6x speed, writes CD-R discs at 8x speed, writes CD-RW discs at 4x speed, reads CDs at 24x speed,)

• Built-in 15-inch (viewable) TFT active-matrix liquid crystal display
• Millions of colors at 1024-by-768-pixel resolution
• Typical viewing angle: 120 degrees horizontal; 90 degrees vertical
• Typical brightness: 200 candela per meter squared
• Typical contrast ratio: 300:1

• NVIDIA GeForce2 MX graphics processor with AGP 2X support
• 32MB of dedicated Double Data Rate (DDR) video memory
• 24-bit true color at all resolutions for displaying millions of colors

• Built-in 56K V.90 fax modem (RJ-11 connector)
• Built-in 10/100BASE-T Ethernet (RJ-45 connector)
• Built-in antennas and card slot for optional 11-Mbps AirPort Card; IEEE 802.11b compliant

• Two 400-Mbps FireWire (IEEE 1394) ports (6); 8 watts shared
• Three USB 1.1 ports (shared on two 12-Mbps controllers); two USB 1.1 ports on keyboard
• Support for FireWire target disk mode for high-speed transfer of files between two computers

2.2 Video Capture

Capturing the existing video was going to be an interesting assignment for me. Since the iMac does not have any sort of video in capabilities, I had to find some other method of inputting video. Alas no PCI slots meant that there was no way of upgrading via an add-in card. But there was the firewire port! Hmm...

One clunky way of importing video is to capture existing analog video onto a DV camcorder via a camcorder's analog video inputs. Then you can export the video from the DV camcorder back into a computer via the firewire port. The problem with this approach is that you basically take twice as long in doing the capture: For an hour long video, you'll spend an hour recording the video onto your DV camcorder and then spend another hour capturing the video from the DV camcorder to the iMac. Not to mention, you'll wear out your DV camcorder heads over time.

Another method was using special external devices that took as input, analog video sources, and then outputted the video as DV format. There are a number of manufacturers that do this. I chose to purchase the Canopus ADVC-100 device directly from canopus. The first time I saw this device was via a review within PC Magazine. Upon seeing the article, I thought "This is the kind of device that would be great to convert analog video to digital video without the need for a PCI add in card" and sure enough, it was!

You can find the official product information for this device at Canopus's website here.

I'll include the marketing specifications found on the Canopus website here:

• High Quality (original hardware design, co-developed with NEC
  
• Custom hardware Codec chip (original Canopus algorithm)
  
• Locked Audio Support (capture long clips w/perfect audio sync)
  
• Analog output of NTSC color bars for reference signal)
  
• 4-pin DV jack on front; 6-pin FireWire jack on back
  
• Analog input connector on front
  
• Analog output connector on back

Front of the ADVC-100 (a bit fuzzy)	Back of the ADVC-100	ADVC-100 AC Cable

The Technical Specifications are as follows:

Digital Video in/out
- 6pin S200 (200Mbps), 4pin S200 (200Mbps)

Analog Video in/out
- NTSC (525/60), PAL (625/50) S-video, composite

Audio in/out
- stereo unbalanced line level

Sampling Frequency
- 48kHz/16bit/2ch, 32kHz/12bit/4ch

Power Input
- DC5V

Power Supply
- DC5V AC Adapter AC100V/220V

Power Usage
- 5.5W

Size
- 146mm x 27.2mm x 120mm

A nice thing about the Canopus ADVC-100 is that it comes bundled with a DV cable. I chose to use a longer one that I had lying around instead.

2.3 Other equipment

I'll list some of the other miscellaneous equipment that I used for this project. They basically were:

• Video/Audio composite cables
• Firewire cables
• Pioneer DVD-R discs

2.4 Software

As for the software side, I used basically programs that were made available freely from Apple. Using the OS X platform, I used the following applications for my video capture/creation project: iMovie and iDVD

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