Old School & New World.

[iMac600]

It's not too much of a worry, I have the hard disk on a sled at the moment that just snaps right into the Power Mac G3, and when I want to do the transfer, I power the system down, slide it out, slide it into an external drive case and power it up on the Core 2 Duo.

There's another issue i'm dealing with though, and that's the fact I can't seem to save the video without creating some audio/video sync issues. If I could read the raw import scratch video from Final Cut, this wouldn't be an issue, but Final Cut scratch videos won't play back on the iMac Core 2. So the battle continues...

...maybe i'll just get an adapter for the iMac to import the video.

EDIT: Maybe the fact I formatted the drive as Mac OS Standard isn't helping the cause. I hadn't even noticed it wasn't Extended until now. Damn. I'll try an Extended formatted drive and use iMovie as opposed to Final Cut Pro (a bit overkill for the otherwise really basic tasks going on here) and see what happens.

 

[Cory5412]

If you don't mind my asking, is the drive to which you are capturing an IDE drive or scsi drive? I've been thinking of using my beige G3 in a similar manner (I have an old analogue handycam and wouldn't mind grabbing the video off of it)

What if you did the capture in final cut pro and then saved the capture as a normal quicktime file, either over your network or just to the drive? Back when I was using FCP, you used to be able to open the captured files in quicktime player or whatever other quicktime app you had.

Failing all else of course, you could just do the cutting and compressing on the G3.

Also of note, from the wiki article on VHS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS

Normal VHS has just about 240-250 usable lines of picture resolution, S-VHS has about 420, so if you needed to save on disk space, recording at 320x240 would probably be fine.

 

[iMac600]

The internal drive is an IDE, which doesn't seem to struggle much at all with the recording process. I have 50GB SCSI drives that could work a little better, but I haven't tried that just yet. Storage isn't really an issue, even if I pull the data in at 640x480 uncompressed, I can still fit about 2 hours worth of video into the 40GB of available space.

The issue I face with this is a little problem with video/audio sync. The raw capture scratch files coming in from the VCR and edited in Final Cut Pro have no issues with the video and audio remaining in sync. If I try to save it down to a regular QuickTime file though, the resulting file comes in at over 2GB (although I can't get an exact figure as OS 9 can't tell me the full size) and the audio and video gradually get out of sync as the video plays through.

I'd like to have tried using Network Transfers, but I can't get any network card other than the onboard to work, which means i'm limited to 10BaseT speeds. Adding insult to injury, now the onboard networking doesn't seem to work either, along with the USB and FireWire cards. This thing has no I/O and I still can't figure out why.

The final option is to do all the cutting and compressing on the G3, as you said. The compression stage is what will kill it though, the hardware is nowhere near capable of crunching that much data down. Even the Core 2 takes 2 hours, i'd hate to see a 400mhz G4 chip trying that. Cinepak compression or something, perhaps, but i'd be wary of losing quality during compression of an already low quality video clip.

 

[classic]

After reading through this thread and starting with a stock Beige G3, I went into upgrade frenzy over a period of a year or so.

I now have a beige G4 with a sonnet zif running at 400mhz, 768mb RAM and a 60gb HDD with a wings card.

I downloaded the 3ivx_d4_451 codec from macintosh garden and have been successfully capturing with Adobe Premiere 5.1 at 768x576

The resulting file size is about 1gb for 2 hours.

I have a DVD writer on the Beige G4 which I use to burn my captured data.

Its a shame the wings card can't utilise anything more than onboard video, but the 6mb of VRAM is doing its job.

I can still play DVD's using a wired4DVD card

Thanks everyone for all the tips!

 

[iMac600]

Glad the thread and its information could be of assistance. I still have the G3 Minitower, but I sold the G4 ZIF a while back and gave up on importing video from VHS since I could never get the audio/video sync absolutely spot on across the entire length of the recording. Haven't really revisited it since. Chances are a change of software would have done it, but I never got my hands on a copy of Adobe Premiere at the time so I can't be sure. Would give it another shot if I found another G4 ZIF.

 

[classic]

Yeah, the G4 zif (sonnet) was critical for getting the video into a manageable file size using that divx codec.

As for the sync issue, I was getting really frustrated by it as well. I was totally stumped until I looked

at the usb card installed and thought what if I get the audio in through that!

Picked up a little green usb audio in/out doohickey for $2.00 and it works perfectly!

If you find another G4 zif, don't use one from a yikes machine.

The beige only recognises half the L1 cache (16k) and none of the L2 cache.

 

[classic]

A pic to illustrate:

 

[yuhong]

FYI, for support of large files you need Mac OS 9, an application that is able to use Mac OS 9's new file manager APIs (BTW long filenames are also supported using the same API too, it is just that most apps did not use them), and the file must be stored on a HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) volume.