VHS to Final Cut

Been using an old Dazzle product to hook up my VCR to Mac via Firewire. But the Dazzle is old and cranky and my older VHS tapes cause it to stall. Can someone recommend a product to help me get my old VHS memories onto my FC timeline?

Happy Halloweeeen!

JM

If you have a deck or camera that allows EE, or E to E, you can just pass the video out of the VHS via the normal yellow/white/red cables into your deck or camera, then out of that via firewire into FCP. You may need to select 'video' on your deck (rather than DV) and turn on EE in the menu. Then setup your capture to be 'non controllable device', play the VHS and use 'capture now'.

If you don't have an EE capable deck, you might need a Canopus ADVC, which translates analogue signals to digital and visa versa.

The advantage to the Canopus, is it can be set to get the video levels right. EE through a camcorder will almost always produce slightly dark video--unless you're not in the US.

The disadvantage of the Canopus is the $300 pricetag.

Generally, with VHS, nobody is going to notice.

Koz

Right on. Thanks for the tips!

JM

I had to do this recently. Least expensive option for me: I spent $75 on ebay and got a used canon ZR-100 that digitizes/passes signal fron the VCR to FCP. Did the trick.

-Adam