For my regular reader this piece will contain no entertainment value whatsoever. For some poor guy who's been locked in his computer room for a week trying to dub video, this will be the Holy Grail.

So you've got your PC with a DVD burner and a stack of blank DVDs and you're ready to convert those musty old videotapes to digital. This shouldn't be any harder than when you converted your cassettes and LP's to CD, right? Wrong!

Converting analog videotapes to digital is different for a few reasons. For one thing you're dealing with video as well as audio, and the two have to be synced. Secondly, there is a secret circuitry called Macrovision all around that exists for the purpose of thwarting your efforts. Macrovision was created by the movie industry to keep you from bootlegging VHS tapes and selling them at the Highway 41 Flea Market, but it can also intervene when your encoding device detects a weak signal from your aged 1980's videocassettes and mistakes it for Macrovision. Your video will turn dark and purple in spots, maybe becoming so scrambled its unwatchable.

There's also the matter of what software will "capture," i.e. record, the video you're feeding to your computer best, and whether it allows editing, and will you have to create a menu, and can you save your DVD project as an ISO image or a VIDEO_TS file or will you have to burn it directly to disc?

Fortunately for you I have spent three weeks of my life discovering these answers so that you may get this over with and spend the rest of the weekend in the sunshine.

Capturing video to your computer

First, check to make sure your computer has a Firewire, or IEEE 1394, port. If it doesn't, check your friend's computer, your uncle's, your neighbor's, and the guy you haven't spoken to since 11th grade, because you're going to need a Firewire port to make this happen. If you can't locate one, close this window, turn off your computer and go outside already, because this project ain't happenin'.

EDIT: Unless you have a spare PCI slot in the back of your computer. Then you can get a PCI Firewire card for as little as $10.

EDIT 2: If you don't see a PCI slot, you may have PCI Express slots like I do, which are much smaller and black.

If you've got a Firewire port, now order a Canopus ADVC 110. You need this because your computer cannot convert analog video signal to digital like it did with your audio cassettes. You need an external converter, and the Canopus is widely recognized as the most reliable converter there is. It's a subsidiary of Grass Valley who also make professional television switching equipment, so you're in good hands. They're $240 brand new, but try this with anything less and prepare for rotten video quality, and audio trailing the video so that your 1989 Thanksgiving dinner looks like a Chinese martial arts movie. In fact your computer may not detect any input at all thanks to the magnetic degradation of your tapes.

Plug the video and audio outs of your VCR into the Canopus' ins and the Canopus' Firewire out to your computer's Firewire in, set the Canopus' selector to "analog" and you're almost ready to go. Now as I said, if your tapes are old the Canopus may try to kick in Macrovision protection, causing your video to get dark and purple. Unlike most video devices the Canopus can bypass this, though! Once you've got video running, hold the input selector on the Canopus down for 10 or 15 seconds until the picture freezes and unfreezes. You'll now bypass Macrovision until the next time you turn the Canopus on.

Now that you have all this stuff hooked up, run out in the street, pull your pants down around your ankles and dance around in circles shouting, "Pancakes! Pancakes!" Send me pictures of this activity. It will not help you get your video dubbed, but it will make me laugh and laugh.

In the next episode we'll look at capturing and editing software.