ADVC-100 and Macrovision

[Brian Ellis]

A few persons have asked me what the situation was regarding Macrovision protection with respect to the Canopus ADVC-100 converter. I can now say what I have found.
1) the converter is claimed to be copy-protected in the instruction manual.
2) I've been able to import two commercial PAL VHS tapes into the computer without undue difficulty (jiggling the Input Select Button).
3) I can make DVD/VCD copies without problems from the resultant DV AVI file.
4) I can make VHS copies back again from the same file, through the ADVC-100, the quality being little different (audio/video) from the original if unedited, at least to my ears/eyes on a reasonable TV set. If edited, can even be better! (One of the two trials I made was a National Geographic Video Library one with atrocious colour rendering: I imported a 5 min clip, corrected the colours and recorded it back to a blank VHS: the colours were much more natural! I also did a trial with reduced noise and increased sharpness, using MSPro video filters and, with the colour correction, it was visually more pleasing than the original, even though no more data were added. Rendering of the latter took almost 1 hour for a 5 minute clip.).
5) The only time I was stymied by the converter's protection was exporting a DV file to analogue using MSPro 6.51a, even though I could record the same file to my DVCAM deck. I could also convert it, using MSPro 6.50.

Although I bought the converter essentially for analogue>DV, I have used it once as DV>analogue to make a VHS copy of a 90 minute family project (original DV from the DVCAM deck) for my daughter and was very pleased with the results, probably as good as can be done with VHS.

I can recommend this fairly low-cost converter for those who wish to import analogue signals into DV format (I've mixed DV and analogue sources in a single project without any problems re field order or frame size, saving rendering times).

[davpen]

"jiggling the Input Select Button"

If you press and hold the Input Select Button for a moderate amount of time (I don't remember how long it is actually supposed to be but 20sec will do the trick) then hit the button again to switch back to analogue mode you will find the DVC-100 will have no problem converting Macrovision encoded content to DV.


Cheers,

David.

[orbital]

Hi Brian

What about drop frames, do you get any and how does it handle them? Does it stop capturing when it encounters a poor signal or noise??

Thanks

Orbital

[Brian Ellis]

Orbital

I've never had a dropped frame reported from MSP Capture, no matter how bad the signal. OTOH, by coincidence to your question, I tried a really bad commercial (protected) tape yesterday (very old and, I suspect, stretched). It caused hesitations of about 1 second (A and V), as if the synch could not cope and it had to catch up again, which it did OK, until the next hiccup. However, the tape really was bad and it is the only case I have had of problems. After a few rewinds in each direction, it was somewhat better, but far from perfect. Regarding noise, no problems: I converted very successfully 30 minutes of VHS-C clips taken at the Singapore Night Safari in December 1995 (last shots taken with a VHS camera: I bought a mini-DV the following day!). The main lighting source was a half-obscured half-moon, supplemented by a tiny amount of judiciously placed artificial lighting, totalling about -100 lux , I think. The signal was extremely noisy.