I'm just curious: What do the admins use to record bumps from their TVs?
Do you use a capture card, a DVD recorder, or other means?
Currently, capure cards :-D only way to get HD, and the cleanest source. We have used DVDs, however, with pretty good results as well. And some of the older bumps get the VHS treatment :lol:.
Those DVD bumps look a lot worse now since the HD revolution :roll:
-Everything- looks a lot worse since the HD revolution :lol:. Fun fact; most standard def bumps came from my capture card, hooked up to my fabulously analog cable signal.
For SD content: I have a DVR that I use to record the entire block. Then I browse through the recordings for the clips I want, and capture them to my PC using a Pinnacle MovieBox DV. This is a FireWire box because FireWire provides a constant data rate, which is good for capturing video, unlike USB which is a variable data rate.
For HD content: Hauppauge Colossus (http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_colossus.html) PCIe capture card. I don't have a HD DVR, so I use a PC to record the block. Recording the video is the easy part, finding a program that can manipulate the recorded video is difficult.
Since the flooding in Taiwan last year caused hard drive prices to go up, I haven't gotten any new hard drives since then. I'll need to start recording over some stuff from last year pretty soon.
I was fortunate to have a pretty good quality picture for CN on the SD feed (except in 2007-8). If I ever get some extra time I'll try replacing some of the poorer looking SD bumps with a better version. Most of them have already been remastered.
I just use my Mac Mini plugged directly into my cable box! It's got a nice firewire port in the back that's perfect for the high speed capture. I just write to a scratch drive so I don't wear out my internal drive since I do a TON of video capturing :D