EyeTV Hybrid - Editable format?

I am going to purchase my first Mac this weekend and I have read that the EyeTV is a good TV tuner/Video import device. I am wanting to do some video editing and converting of old home movies that are on VHS. I have two main questions about doing this. 1. Will there be much quality loss? (I know VHS isn’t the greatest quality to start with) and 2. Will the format that the EyeTV Hybrid records to, be editable in iMovie? I can’t wait to become a Mac user, and if all goes well I will probably replace my laptop with a MBP in the near future. Thanks in advance for the answers.

Bryan

1. It'll be the same quality as the VHS, there might be a very very tiny loss and on the computer it will look like a huge loss due to the resolution difference.

2. Yes you can export as an iMovie file and you'll then be able to open it up and play with it.

Have fun! I really enjoy my EyeTV 250.. a very cool piece of hardware

I just converted a couple of C-VHS tapes with my new EyeTV Hybrid tonight. The quality seemed to be very good. You _WILL_ loose some quality as you always do copying from analog. The better your source the better your conversion.

The EyeTV Hybrid encodes its result into MPEG2 which is not usable in iMovie. What you can do is select the recording and Export it to an iMovie project. I don't like that because I may have many files I want to include into one movie project. So I'll likely export my conversions to DV format. Oh, this will be another point for degradation of the quality.

There are other devices that allow you to record over a firewire cable straight into iMovie or Final Cut. Some video cameras have a pass through capabilty that does the same thing. A search here or on the Net should find those. One company is Pinnacle Systems. This would be a better choice because you are only performing one conversion step.