Works well for turning tapes into DVDs
Written: Sep 13 '05
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Full NTSC support, good video quality, decent feature set
Cons: Some software problems, but no show-stoppers
The Bottom Line: I found workarounds for any serious problems I encountered, so I can recommend this package for its respectable feature set, good video quality, and straightforward operation.
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| f8ster's Full Review: Voyetra Turtle Beach Video Advantage ADX Video Cap... |
Quick summary of key points:
- Works well for analog capture (e.g. Hi-8 tapes)
- Captured video quality is good and provides full NTSC quality
- Software is adequate, and provides good functionality
- I ran into some problems, but was able to work around them
Overview
The Turtle Beach Video Advantage ADX provides a solution for capturing analog or digital video to your computer, and optionally burning it to CD or DVD in a number of formats. My primary use is to copy all my Hi-8 (analog) video tapes to DVDs for backup and safekeeping, and the solution works well for that purpose.
This package is in the mid-range price-wise -- not the cheapest, but one of the cheaper packages that supports full NTSC (described later).
What's Included
The package includes a PCI card you have to install into your computer, several cables (including A/V and Firewire), software, and manuals. The card provides inputs for IEEE 1394 (Firewire) for input from a digital video camera, S-Video, and composite (RCA) video.
The software packages included are: ADFullCap, a specialized capture package used for capturing analog video (like Hi-8, or from a VHS tape) into a variety of formats. (I had some problems with this package; more on that later.) CyberDirector, the main piece of software you'll use, has its own capture utility, as well as utilities to edit video and produce your edited video. CyberProducer Express is also provided, which allows you to burn your videos to CD and DVD.
Installation
Proper order of installation is critical, so follow the directions exactly. In my case, the CyberDirector software wouldn't install. However, a visit to Turtle Beach's web site described my problem, and a workaround (I had a web cam plugged in, which was confusing the installer -- unplugging the web cam during the install solved the problem).
Capture
Video Advantage provides a lot of options for capturing analog video, and I've tried a lot of them, with mixed success.
Video Advantage supports full NTSC capture, which means it'll capture video at 720x480 at 30 frames per second. (I, unfortunately, had previously purchased another package -- Dazzle DVC80 -- which does not do this, and the resulting video quality was very disappointing.) The video quality from the Turtle Beach Video Advantage was really good.
I started with ADFullCap. A feature of ADFullCap is advertised on the box -- the ability to capture analog video directly into digital (DV) format, making editing cleaner. DV is about 25% the size of full, uncompressed AVI, so it seemed like a good choice. However, after burning a DVD captured in this format, I recommend against it. Fast movements in the video jitter badly, and the videos were really unwatchable when burned to DVD.
I then switched to best-quality AVI. The video quality captured in this format looks excellent. However, it takes up 72GB on your hard disk for every hour of analog video, which makes keeping the video unrealistic.
One major problem I kept running into was that the video and audio would get out of sync. Note that the Video Advantage only captures video; you run the audio in through the Line In input on your sound card or computer's motherboard. It turns out that because of these separate capture sources, keeping them in sync is tricky for the software. Several options are provided for changing how the sync is done, but I had little success with any of them.
Ultimately, I gave up on ADFullCap, and tried the Capture utility included with CyberDirector. This worked much better, and had no video/audio sync problems. Instead of capturing to AVI, I captured directly to the format used by DVDs (MPEG-2) at the best quality level. The resulting files were much smaller (3.6GB for 1 hour of video), and they could be burned directly without an intermediate re-encoding step, making the process a lot faster. This is the approach I would recommend.
The capture utility allows you to end the capture after a certain time (e.g. 1 hour) or after a certain file size is reached. This is nice, and I used this a lot.
One other note: the audio I captured was unbelievably loud. There's an option to turn down the incoming audio, and I had to turn it down to about 20% to have normal audio volume. I'm not sure if this was just due to my camera, my sound card, or what.
Edit and Produce
If you want to, you can fully edit your videos with CyberDirector. This is very similar to other video-editing packages I've used. It allows you to split videos, trim them, rearrange clips, provide transitions between them (fades, etc.). You can then use the 'Produce' feature to create a new video with your edits. (The original video is unchanged during this edit process.)
Burn
The last step (and an optional one if all you want to do is save the videos on your computer) is to burn the videos to DVD. You'll need to have captured them in MPEG-2 format, or have used the 'Produce' step above, to convert them to DVD-ready MPEG-2.
The burning utility included is called CyberProducer Express. It is not very full-featured, but it does provide enough support for basic tasks. It uses a step-by-step wizard approach and is easy to use. You import the video files you want to burn, set up the DVD menus and background, and choose a quality level. I chose the highest quality level, which only burns 1 hour of video on a standard single-layer DVD. (Because of this, I only capture my video segments 1 hour at a time as MPEG-2, which saves me an editing step.)
One annoying feature: the utility creates temporary files in C:\MyWorks, and doesn't delete them when it's done. It took me a while to figure out where all my disk space went.
One other small issue: the software appears to only support single-layer (4.7GB) DVDs, not dual-layer. I have a dual-layer DVD drive, so it'd be nice to be able to burn 2 hours at best quality instead of 1 if I wanted to.
Playback
Note that you can play MPEG-2 videos (or other formats, such as AVI) directly on your computer using Windows Media Player or other software. The MPEG-2 videos I captured would play well, but would crash Windows Media Player 10 at the very end of the video for some reason. This was a minor inconvenience, though.
The DVDs produced played fine everywhere I tried them, including my PC and my DVD player in my home theater system. The quality was good, although not as good as when I plug my video camera directly into the TV. Still, having used the best quality levels when capturing and burning, the DVDs are as good as they'll get, and I'm happy with them overall.
Summary
Having tried a cheaper alternative (Dazzle DVC 80) and been quite unsatisfied, I have been very happy overall with Video Advantage. For what I wanted -- backing up all my Hi-8 tapes onto DVD -- it worked well, and after some experimentation, it wen pretty smoothly and it didn't take me long to finish. I now plan to move on to some of those old VHS tapes before they fall apart. :-) I found workarounds for any serious problems I encountered, so I can recommend this package for its respectable feature set, good video quality, and straightforward operation.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
f8ster
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Location: Camas, WA, USA
Reviews written: 16
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