There are several other ways in which video can be digitized that you may consider.ĭigitizing Through a CamcorderMany Digital8 and DV camcorders have analog inputs which will allow you to use them as an analog-to-digital converter, either as a play-through device or by re-recording your analog footage on Digital8 or mini DV.
Still more sophisticated are professional devices such as the ADVC700 from Grass Valley, which is designed to be used in broadcast studios. It will allow you to play and receive broadcast TV signals, as well as analog and digital cable on your Mac computer, included with built in hardware compression for capturing video from the air, even exporting it to your iPod or iPhone.
Elgato’s Eye TV 250 Plus Digital/Analog TV Receiver and Video Converter, for example, which sells for less than $200, adds a whole host of other features. Things get more complex from there, depending on what your needs are. It’s about sixty dollars and will convert your analog signals to 720×480 NTSC digital, it has both S-Video and composite in and comes with basic editing software. The Pyro AV Capture Express USB, for example, connects to your computer via USB. These can either be cards, that fit internally into your computer and provide a permanent solution, or boxes that attach via USB or FireWire that are more easily removed and stored when not in use or shared between computers. There are many A/D converter boxes that interface between legacy equipment and your computer with a wide range of prices and features. Will you be using short bits from your analog tapes, or do you want to convert everything? Will this be part of your every-day video editing system? (Are you currently shooting an analog format with no plans to upgrade?) Do you need to support balanced audio (XLR) in? Do you want the ability to move digital video back to an analog media? One thing to take into consideration when shopping for an analog-to-digital (A/D) converter is the amount of footage you need to convert.
Which means plan an upgrade strategy for all your existing digital footage and, when practical, keep important analog masters. The format you digitize into your computer today might not be useful tomorrow. Digital playback and recording requires microprocessors and, as digital technology is advancing at such an incredible rate, formats change rapidly. You can try outputting audio tracks on your non-linear editor at various sampling rates and see for yourself when you begin to notice a degradation in sound quality.Īnalog requires much less sophisticated equipment than digital – Edison made his first analog recorder out of little more than a pin, a horn, and a bit of tin foil. Digital can be duplicated again and again without error each copy is exactly the same as the original.īut digital’s strength can also be its weakness – if the sampling rate is too slow – imagine a digital clock that displays only hours and minutes but not seconds – analog media can be more accurate. Imagine going into a room, looking at an analog clock, then manually setting another clock based on the first, each time you do this, there will be a slight error in one direction or another. “Generational loss” occurs each time an analog tape is duplicated because the values are not read back exactly the same way every time. Looking at a digital clock, everybody agrees on the number. An analog clock is one that measures value across a continual scale, the hands move from “1” to “2” by proceeding through all the space in between where as in digital, where things are expressed by a discrete value, “1” turns directly into “2”.īecause copying analog values is inexact (you look at the clock and see five minutes past three, someone else might read it as four, another as six) each time copies are made, errors are introduced. The easiest example of the difference between analog and digital is the most familiar – a clock. We use the terms “analog” and “digital” a lot, some people may be unclear as to what they mean and why one is better than the other is.