Hi All,

First post here so I’m hoping someone can help me out with some good advice.
I tried to get into digital video editing a few years ago but was put off by a bad product I bought. It was the ‘Dazzle DV-Hollywood Bridge’, sometimes it would work and sometimes it would not. Anyway, I have decided to give it another try and yet again the Dazzle has proved to be very unreliable to the point that it is now in the bin. So I am now looking for a new Analogue to digital bridge with a firewire connection and was toying with buying the ‘Cameo Convert 800 Digital Video Editing System’ by Terratec ( http://www.savastore.com/productinfo...d=207&rstrat=0 ) ... or something similar ???

I don’t want to end up making another ‘bad choice’ so I thought it best ask for some advice!

At the moment I have a bunch of Hi-8 and VHS tapes to transfer and edit and currently use Movie Edit Pro (which is also about 2 years old) so any recommendation for a better editing suit would be welcome.

Cheers

The spec on that looks good, but I'm not familiar with the company. Not necessarily a problem, although buying a more popular company's products can make it easier to find 'informal' support. Me? I had aload of old VHS tapes to convert and bought a Canopus ADVC-55 with which I've been absolutely thrilled. It's about the same price as the Terratec. Compared with what you're looking at, I think the ADVC-55 is analog to digital only rather than analog to digital and digital to analog - not sure if that would be an issue for you. Oh, and I use Premiere Pro - but given my very limited horizons and even more limited editing skills, I use only about 0.00001% of what it'll do. I'd suggest Premiere Elements - again, a wealth of 'informal' support available (like here) and, if you outgrow Elements' abilities, migration to Pro would be pretty painless.

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The biggest fool can ask questions that the wisest man cannot answer...

Terratec is a name familiar with me. I'm sure they are bundled with a well known editing applicaction. Perhaps Vegas.

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Thanks everyone. I decided to try the the DVD Xpress USB 2 bridge. So far it is working out fine although I needed to intall a USB2 pci card to be able to achive the data rates to record AVI files.

Not sure how you guys work but I prefer to capture as DV-AVI files (yes, I know they are huge so I bought a couple of 300GB hard drives) and edit and then export the final master avi to mpeg2.

It came bundled with 'Video Studio 8' which has an excellent converter however I still prefer to edit my AVI's in 'movie maker pro' and then compile my DVD in Video studio. Movie maker pro is so easy to use and edit with IMO.