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External video capture devices (non-DV, non-mpeg) ?

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What (or are there any) external video capture devices that can capture uncompressed full resolution PAL/NTSC video?

I know there's a heap of PCI capture devices & graphics cards that can capture to uncompressed full res video, but my experience with them has been that they're always hassle due to the drivers being a complete pain, plus the fact the video signal has to go straight to the computer so there's more chance of RF inteference.

I like my Canopus ADVC-100 because it's external plus I get great capture from it but it's DV so it's already compressed by the time I get to use it and I'm just curious to see what else is out there.
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***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
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Hmm.. not sure if it's possible. An external device must be connected to the PC somehow, and high-speed connections such as USB2.0 and IEEE-1394 can only do ~400Mbps. Not sure off the top of my head what the datarate of uncompressed PAL video is, but I'd expect it to be more than that.

That said, take a look at the TerraTec Grabster AV 250. It has no hardware encoder, yet claims it can do full res PAL and NTSC capture.

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Not only that, but it also says "Experience Video-to-Disc in one click - the fastest way to copy your movies to disc, without having to store the video onto your hard drive first!". It takes a lot of horsepower to convert to MPEG in real time, assuming that's what it's talking about here. I'm very interested in knowing how it accomplishes this.

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Logically, uncompressed NTSC (no audio) is about 29.7mb per second of video (720x480x3x29.97), USB 2.0 is capable of 57mb/s speeds, there's no mention of any hardware encoding on that TerraTec Grabster page or on the Articles page where the hardware encoders are pointed out, so there's a possibility it does send uncompressed video to the PC and the mpeg is software encoded on-the-fly with a fast compressor.

The technical specs say the faster the PC the higher the resolution of encoding: Technical Data - Grabster AV 250
(looks like XP only, damn, my video PC is W2k)

This unit might be work looking further into.
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***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
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Citizen, you are of course correct (even if your units are confusing: mb/s = millibits per second ).

If I had done the simple calc for the uncompressed 24bit RGB PAL datarate = 720 x 576 x 24bits x 25fps = 249Mbps then I would have seen that it's clearly possible to transfer over USB 2.0 (max 480Mbps).

See also the Pinnacle Dazzle DVC90.

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Ooh, I had forgotten about those (I have an older version...the 70, I believe.)

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

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<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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Are the Dazzle products 'ok' nowadays? I ask this because a few years ago when I bought my Canopus ADVC-100 I was researching capture devices and had initially set my sights on a Dazzle DV Bridge but reading many user reviews on the product put me right off buying it (lots of complaints & frustrations), then someone mentioned the ADVC range and just about all the user reviews I saw praised it so I bought one and it's suited me very well.

Ever since I encountered the chroma compression problem with DV, especially red, I've been wondering about high quality uncompressed capture but until now never really had the harddrive space needed to deal with the filesizes involved, nor the need for it. Capturing VHS to DV is fine and wouldn't really benefit from uncompressed capturing, but laserdisc will.
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***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
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I'm not sure about the Dazzle products. I think Dazzle's DV Bridge converts analog to DV, and captures over firewire, maintaining the red chroma compression problem. You don't wanna go uncompressed, trust me. I used to work for a production company, and my uncompressed SD cost a pretty penny. High system specs are a must, the SD capture card is expensive, and you need a RAID to capture the video. Oh, and one minute is over 800 MB! Only someone who'd plunk down $15,000 for a Japanese Laserdisc player should consider this option.

I'm wondering the same thing as you: How to make Laserdisc and VHS edits without going to DV. Do the Laserdisc preservations (Star Wars, Blade Runner, etc.) sidestep this by capturing directly to the MPEG2 using an external hardware card, so no editing/recompression is neccessary? I noticed OCPMovie's "Classic Editions" (AMAZING as they were) had serious antialiasing issues. Is that a side-effect of editing in DV? I'd love to see comparisons of MPEG2s made from DV captures and MPEG2s encoded on-the-fly by a breakout card.

One more question: If the source is DVD (as in OCPMovie's case) why not edit the exact MPEG2s ripped from the disc? You'd need to recompress when you output, but you need to do that anyway to fit on a 4.3GB disc.
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Originally posted by: mcfly89
You don't wanna go uncompressed, trust me.
What many do is capture uncompressed, and use huffyuv (lossless) compression in software. If higher compression is required, then MJPEG with a high quality setting is a reasonable option.

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