Digital A/V signals through ADVC 300

[Nightjar]

Dear friends,
I'm looking forward to buying an ADVC 300 unit, but before making the "big step" I'd like to clear out some doubts.

I'm planning to use the ADVC 300 mainly to improve digitization quality of Hi8 PAL tapes read by a Sony Digital8 camera that is able to send those Audio/Video signals through its digital (Firewire) port.

• My first question is: does the TBC or any of the filters available on the ADVC 300 work on the digital input, or they are active on the analog inputs only?
  
• 2nd question: you can get quite good results connecting directly the camera to the (Apple iMac) computer through the Firewire port, but the captured video files do show the dreaded multicolored noise line at the bottom of the screen. I know on the Video2 tab of Picture Controller 300 software there is a function called "Edge Adjustment" - should I use this function to cover up that noise at the bottom of the frame, and does it work with the digital input?
  
• Is it confirmed that the Firewire 800 ports are NOT compatible with the ADVC 300 (even using FW 800-400 adapters)?
  
• Does anybody have made some tests of the ADVC 300 with the latest Mac OS X 10.6 - Snow Leopard operating system?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Diego

[SoundFreak]

I have no experiance with this unit, but ad far as I know anything through FireWire is just a direct data transfer. There is no gain then to use the unit. Only through analog inputs there is filtering available.

[kbosward]

In answer to your questions:

1. Filtering on the ADVC-300 works only on the analog inputs.
2. The "dreaded multicolored noise line at the bottom of the screen" comes from the analog tape. It is playback head switching noise. You will see it whether you use your Digital8 camcorder or the ADVC-300 to do the analog-digital conversion -- both converters are simply faithfully converting the analog signal that is being fed to them! You don't see this on playback to a TV because of overscan which zooms into the picture slightly so that the edges of the video frame are off screen. The Edge adjustment has nothing to do with the edges of the frame, rather it is a filter that "sharpens" vertical or horizontal edges of objects within the picture.
3. From memory some people have had problems with FW800 and 800-400 adapters. Probably the best thing is for you to grab a ADVC-300 from a store that has a full refund return policy and give it a go.
4. Haven't tried it myself on OSX 10.6, but if your Digital8 camcorder works fine then the ADVC-300 should also -- it is designed to look like a camcorder to the capture application.

Ken.

[Nightjar]

Originally Posted by kbosward

The "dreaded multicolored noise line at the bottom of the screen" comes from the analog tape. It is playback head switching noise. You will see it whether you use your Digital8 camcorder or the ADVC-300 to do the analog-digital conversion -- both converters are simply faithfully converting the analog signal that is being fed to them!

Thank you Ken for your extremely detailed answers.
I knew already that those bottom noise lines are caused by the analog tape reading, but even if they don't show on TV because of the overscan, they do show on video files played on a computer monitor. My hope was that the ADVC 300 would have some sort of digital crop&enlarge filter to get rid of it completely while digitizing video. But unfortunately it does not look the case.

Thanks anyway!