Pinnacle made some capture cards that are built in MPEG-2 encoder chip, so you won't be able to capture lossless AVI, the only thing you get out of their USB port is compressed MPEG-2, find out that 710-USB is not one them, unless you are ok with MPEG-2.

Edit:
I just looked it up and it does hardware encoding so unfortunately you are limited to MPEG-2 quality, There is one good feature about that box is that if you computer doesn't have a firewire you could use it to transfer DV and D8 tapes to computer using just the USB port on your computer, the box routes the data (including deck button commends) from firewire to USB.

As a former PI you know the importance of maintaining chain of custody and original files. Other than for the sake of maintaining a digital copy for your personal collection, a digital copy is worthless as evidence.

The only problem with 510/710-USB cards is that they had a long production life, and chips can/did change over time. Some versions of the 510/710 are not wanted, while others are. It requires verifying the internals, then running it through tests to gauge behavior. I pair the better 510/710 cards as part of my workflows, in the marketplace, but those are only the known-good cards.

This problem exists from several manufacturers, for various items. The model alone does not suffice to identify it.

For now, let's just assume your already-owned/free card is the correct one, and proceed from there.

The 710-USB is not a hardware MPEG-2 card. The only way it can "capture" MPEG-2 is by using the supremely crappy Studio software. And I write "capture" because it's capturing uncompress AVI, and encoding to MPEG-2 in software. Not just MPEG-2, but inferior MPEG-2 in inferior software.

On that review/article you linked, at the bottom, notice the phrase "real-time capture formats". That generally means software encoding.

We've dealt with a lot of PIs over the years. While CoC matters for the originals, we've been tasked with trying to recover what we can from copies. What they'd then do is see what is recoverable. If anything of value could be gleamed from our attempts, they'd then have the original processed by a costly lab, showing our findings as a guide of what/where to look. At least once, a lab had a difficult time recreating our work, as many seem to be using turn-key apps like Ikena, and not using Avisynth.

RHETRO:
Here's where I found the driver for the Pinnacle 710-USD Moviebox:
"http//cdn.pinnaclesys.com/SupportFiles/Hardware_Installer/readmeHW10.htm"
** NOTE - copy/paste the link in the address bar & remove the quotation marks. The link will not post correctly in this thread **


You'll also need an s-video switch called a "crossbar thing", or virtualdub will be stuck in composite input and you won't see your video. See Lord Smurf's instructions below (works for 710 also).

How to enable s-video input on Pinnacle 510-USB?
Download Crossbar Thing from that thread.

Install drivers, reboot is required.
Start Crossbar Thing, set to s-video crossbar. Close.
Then open VirtualDub, capture mode.
Preview mode, not overlay.
Set to s-video if needed (if not already showing s-video), should look perfect.

Read more: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...#ixzz66VhrtKVM