Random Ideas Sundays: 4 uses for a Canopus ADVC You may have not thought of....

At one point, some one will ask you:

"Can you get the footage off of this VHS tape?"

VHS, being the long dead dinosaur it is in today's
modern world, is still used by many producers of
video: it's cheap, it's easy to record to ( insert tape,
record) and it can be stored easily.

The most often used product to bridge the gap
between this tried and true format of yesteryear
and today's digital format is the Canopus ADVC
box. The current model is the ADVC-110, but
many still use ( and buy at a fraction of the cost)
it's predecessor, the ADVC-100.
( I myself proudly own an ADVC-100).

The ADVC-100 can digital transfer from
any standard analog RCA jack or S-VHS
source via Firewire to your Mac in DV Format,
making it suitable to get tons of old family footage
off of VHS into iMovie and then out to iDVD,
for watching in the living room.

Having done all of my VHS tape footage
over the course of 5 years, I put my ADVC-100
on the shelf last year & hadn't given it much thought.

Recently I pulled it down again while trying
to overcome some problems I was encountering
to some tasks that I wanted to accomplish.
Now, while their are probably other ways of doing
what I wanted, the fact was, by using the
Canopus ADVC-100 to accomplish these tasks,
I was giving it new life and new purpose.

Here now, I'll share these with you and see if you can use your
Canopus unit next time in any of these scenarios, or come up
with your own to extend the life of your Canopus ADVC unit.

1. Capture footage from VCDs:

Last week while trying to get around a problem of getting
some footage off of a VCD ( yes, I have some of those as well),
I encountered an I/O ( In Out) error trying to copy it
through my Computer's Optical drive.

Rather than give up I tried to play the file using VLC's player,
and came up with an idea: The footage could play fine,
but ended short of a few seconds where the bad spot
in the disc was.

So I then it struck me:
I could play the VCD though my settop DVD Player,
run the analog output through my Canopus, and
digitize to DV Stream in realtime,
capturing the footage in realtime direct into iMovie.

Since I only needed the small section of footage before the
bad section of the CD, this would avoid a crash of trying
to extract it through MpegStreamclip,
which would trash the resulting decoding once
it hit the bad spot in the disc.


2. Use it to Digitize Cassette Tapes:

Another such idea came to mind, since I could get
anything analog into the mac via the Canopus,
why not try my hand at digitizing analog audio?

Using a simple portable hand held cassette recorder,
I ran the audio into the Canopus using a trusty
Y- Stereo Audio Cable
from Radio Shack, going out of the player's
headphone jack and into
the audio ports of the Canopus.

Result: I was able to ingest songs from the player
directly into iMovie,
and then export to AIFF from iMovie to iTunes
to put on my iPod.

3. Use it to record video back to a DVD Recorder.

iMovie, FCE and FCP all have the ability to Print Video to Tape,
and by hooking up a mac via FW to the Canopus,
you can Print Video out via FW. The digital signal
can be then routed out to a standalone DVD Recorder
for realtime authoring to a DVD.

This is a great way to get a rough of your timeline out to
a DVD, in realtime. If you needed to show off
a rough edit to a client, this is a surefire way
to get a rough made and avoid the length
of time to compress via iDVD.

4. Use it to bridge Playback to a TV from your Mac.

Of course, a surefire use for the unit is to use the Print to
Tape feature to print out video playback of the timeline
through the Canopus to a VCR or DVD Recorder
connected to a TV, and you can then use your TV
as a cheap way to "monitor" your timeline to
see how your transitions and effects look on a TV,
as well as how the footage in general will look, and if you
need to color correct it before finalizing it.

While having a dedicated Playback Monitor setup would
be ideal so that you can color correct as you go,
for the Independent Videographer, or prosumer
hobbyist on a budget, this is a good way
to work until you get your movie editing to
pay for itself, and thus by new equipment
for your setup.

Tech Tip Tuesday: Recording What Plays on my Mac to a DVD

Occasionally, you get a video file, either via your own
creation through say iMovie or FCP, or you acquire it from
the web, and you want it to end up on DVD, so instead
of watching it on your computer, you can watch it
on DVD, and have it also preserved for posterity.

I do this on a semi regular basis with stuff that will
play on my Mac, say in either Safari or Firefox,
but for some reason hoses when trying to convert
through Quicktime or VisualHub to DVD.
I use a DVD-R Recorder ( non Hard Drive based)
to record the content to a Blank DVD-R.

To accomplish what I'm about to describe to do,
You'll need two things:

1. An Apple DVI to Video adapter, or this one if you have a mini dvi jack, and if your DVD Recorder
accepts video via S-Video, an S-video Cable like
this one here at Radio Shack.

2. A Y Plug ( Stereo mini 1/8in on one side, that goes "Y" to two RCA stero
(R/W) plugs, to hook into your Mac's Headphone port.
Again, Radio Shack carries what you need.


Now For the playback.

1. With Video adapter in, set your Mac to Mirror Desktop out to the input
ports of the DVD Recorder.
With a TV or a Monitor hooked to the DVD Recorder's Video Out,
make sure video signal is recieved. If not, set video inputs
on DVD Recorder until you get the Mac's Desktop displayed.
This may take setting the Video Input on the DVD Recorder
to accept S-Video input, if it naturally doesn't do so, or
setting the input, rear or front, to accept Video in.
Check with your recorder's manual for settings.

2. Hook up "Y" stereo cable to mac headphone out to
the DVD Recorder's audio Inputs.

3. Play the Video on your Mac.
If the file is say Flash Video, if you have downloaded it from
the website, you should be able to play it back in either
Quicktime Player or MpegStreamclip, with the Perian
Quicktime component.
You can then play it back Full Screen on your
Mac, and thus get Full Screen out to the DVD Recorder ( make sure
to hide the dock first, and turn off any screen savers, and apps
that might bounce in the dock like System Updates, Entourage, Mail,
etc.) I mostly use MpegStreamclip for this, as it allows for Full Screen
Playback Natively. Quicktime Player would have to be upgraded
to the PRO version to enable this feature.

if you are getting good playback, and you are getting good sound
(Keep the System sound up at 70% or higher)
then after one run through to make sure everything
goes out ok, you'll be ready to record directly to the DVD Recorder.
Insert a Blank DVD-R, (I prefer Tayio Uden blanks), and
record.

If you cannot download the video file,Say it is a video streaming file
embedded in a browser, you could try and record the stream
by playing it back in QT Pro or MpegStreamclip, but buffering issues
will cause you to have some skips and stutters as it fills the buffer.
Just be aware of that and know that will be your trade off
if you can't download it to the Mac and have to play it streaming.

Tip Tuesday