Dubbed Like A Cheap Japanese Movie

I don't know what's worse, that I'm still awake at 9:00 AM, or that the past five or six hours of messing with video capture have been a total waste. One thing on my to-do list is to take all of my old band's videos and convert them from VHS-C to DVD. I've been fighting with this on and off for a while, partly because my video capture card (a discontinued Winnov Videum model) is basically ancient, by which I mean I picked it up in probably '98 or '99. I'm wondering if it's just not up to the task...I want to capture at 640x480 since I'll be transferring to DVD (which typically uses 720x480, but I don't want to throw the aspect out of whack). The software that came with the card sucks, and the card itself doesn't play well with other software. NeroVision laughed at it. Not even VirtualDub could step up. I finally thought to try Sonic Foundry's Vegas, remembering that I had a copy laying around. It seems to capture pretty well, dropping about 3 or 4 frames over the course of 90 minutes. No problem there, and I'm even doing compression on the fly. I have to...the compressed file was 14 gigabytes. I may need to get a new hard drive, since I only had about 35 gigs free on this one.

So I got about an hour and a half of video captured - which somehow seems to have taken me around 2.5 hours, not sure how that happened since it's real time - and I'm looking at it in Windows Media Player, checking the sound levels against some of my regularly-volumed MP3s. The levels are fine, but the audio gets increasingly out of sync as the video progresses. Which sucks.

I guess I will go back and try recording it in five to ten minute increments, then splicing those together, since Vegas looked like it allows for that. If anyone has any advice, I'd love to hear it. I may break down and get one of those USB 2.0 video capture devices, like the VideOh! by Adaptec.

Currently listening to: an out-of-sync "State of Love and Trust", Revolution Block