I like Elgato stuff, but this one looks like a bit of a turkey. They are obviously saving money by using your CPU to do the video encoding in real time, but this is always going to be hit-and-miss unless you've got some serious processing power.
I had much better results with an external SCART-to-Firewire box made by Miglia. It was a little bit more expensive (about £120 I think), but it encodes to DV format in hardware, in real time, and is powered by the Firewire link.
The advantage is that iMovie (or any other linear editing suite) can understand DV format directly, so you don't really need any other software on a Mac. The disadvantage is that DV, being based on MJPEG, creates much bigger files than MPEG4 or H.264. Of course, that's not really a problem because you can easily convert to those formats, or others like MPEG2 (for DVD) at a later stage. And then it doesn't matter about CPU power because you don't care if it's real time or not.
As the review said, not really worth it for old movies, but I had a load of VHS camcorder footage of my kids when they were small. For that, it was ideal.
Register
Miglia capture box works well
I like Elgato stuff, but this one looks like a bit of a turkey. They are obviously saving money by using your CPU to do the video encoding in real time, but this is always going to be hit-and-miss unless you've got some serious processing power.
I had much better results with an external SCART-to-Firewire box made by Miglia. It was a little bit more expensive (about £120 I think), but it encodes to DV format in hardware, in real time, and is powered by the Firewire link.
The advantage is that iMovie (or any other linear editing suite) can understand DV format directly, so you don't really need any other software on a Mac. The disadvantage is that DV, being based on MJPEG, creates much bigger files than MPEG4 or H.264. Of course, that's not really a problem because you can easily convert to those formats, or others like MPEG2 (for DVD) at a later stage. And then it doesn't matter about CPU power because you don't care if it's real time or not.
As the review said, not really worth it for old movies, but I had a load of VHS camcorder footage of my kids when they were small. For that, it was ideal.