3. Connecting everything

Putting everything together was fairly simple. Though not quite connect the dots, it might as well have been. I chose to connect the A/V composite cables from my TV set straight to the Canopus ADVC-100 device. Unfortunately I did not have an S-Video port to spare but if I had one, I would have used that in favor of the regular video out. (Keep that in mind if you want to do something similar to what I'm trying to do). I then connected a firewire cable between the ADVC-100 and the iMac. Turn on the TV, VCR, ADVC-100, and the iMac and we're all set to go. Please excuse my drawing skills in creating the following diagram but hopefully it'll give you an idea of what the heck I'm talking about.

Here's a picture of the Canopus device with all the connectors in place. Note that you don't see my TV but I'm using a 25 foot a/v cable.

4. Video Capture and iMovie

So the first step to all of this madness was to capture the analog video from my VCR to the iMac. Since I already had my VCR connected to my TV via my A/V Receiver, I popped in a tape of Band of Brothers Episode 2 and prepared to start playing the video.

But before playing, I had to make sure to launch iMovie. iMovie is Apple's free implementation of a simple movie capturing application. For those from the Windows world, a similar application would be Microsoft's Movie Maker Application (version 1.2). iMovie is definitely more powerful and refined compared to Movie Maker so I was already impressed with what I saw. From the perspective of the iMac, the Canopus ADVC-100 video capture device looked just like a regular DV camcorder. The only real difference of course is that the ADVC-100 could not be controlled by the iMac the way a DV camcorder can be controlled (via Start, Stop, Rewind etc) - why? There's nothing to control on the ADVC-100 device. Once the video starts playing from the VCR, you essentially start capturing the video that is piped through the ADVC-100 straight to the iMac via the firewire port. From the perspective of iMovie, the incoming video is of a DV format. The ADVC-100 does a wonderful job of converting the analog video into the DV format.

iMovie Capturing incoming video from the ADVC-100	Exporting the clip to disk	Export Progress

Now iMovie will create short clips or segments of the captured video as it continues to progress along. Initially I had a concern that iMovie might drop some frames but the iMac was powerful enough such that no frames were dropped or at least perceived to have been dropped. Again, being a Windows person, I expected the file format saved to be an AVI file but to my initial surprise, iMovie saved the movie into a Quicktime file (duh).

For this particular article, I actually did a very quick capture of the video - a 20 second clip from Episode 2. I'll try and put up a sample of the capture but I'll most likely need to convert the media to DivX for bandwidth concerns. (It's on my to do list). Sorry folks but please don't ask me for copies of the Band of Brothers series. I don't really need to be in trouble from HBO :)

TO DO: Insert that sample video capture

So to summarize at this point, I've connected everything and started playback of the tapes. The analog video gets converted into a DV format by the Canopus ADVC-100 and then iMovie captures the DV format into a very large quicktime file.

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