Pinnacle Video Capture for Mac

Question

After talking with a bunch of salesmen (considering getting a DvD writer), I took the advice of someone in the Apple Store and bought a Pinnacle Video Capture for Mac to copy my laserdiscs. It was $100 before tax, and didn't do stuff I don't plan on doing anyway. I did spend another $25 to get an S-video cable.
I installed the software and connected it up to my LD. I started capturing the movie, and selected S-Video (although in the small window they showed, I didn't see any difference between that and video out. I selected a max time from a limited selection, and let it record.
After a while, I went downstairs and saw that the audio and video were not synchronized at all. I let it continue.
After a while I came down again, and the movie was finished, so I stopped it. I found the MP4 - it was in the iTunes movie directory, and played it in iTunes. I fast-forwarded it to near the end, the voice and video were way off-set.
I haven't tried burning this yet.
Quicktime player doesn't think this is a valid movie file. I selected "open with" and "other" and the recommended applications had iMovie greyed out.
Why in the world would the audio and video record at different speeds?
Do I have to buy software to edit the movie down to the correct size?
My Mac has:
Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac7,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
Memory: 2 GB
Bus Speed: 800 MHz
Boot ROM Version: IM71.007A.B03
SMC Version: 1.21f4
I noticed the Pinacle Video Capture program was still running, so I tried to quit it, and got a window asking for my administrator ID and passsword to allow Pinnacle Video Capture to make changes. Why?

Answer 1

The audio drifted out of sync because the Dazzle doesn't support locked audio. For short videos (say, under 10 minutes) this won't be very noticeable but when you capture longer videos it becomes progressively worse over time.
What do you want to do with your Laserdisk copies? Watch them on your iPod? Edit and/or burn to DVD?
A device like the Canopus ADVC-110 will do the video/audio conversion properly, keeping the audio and video in sync regardless of the length of your video. It converts to DV, not to MP4, and you would use it with iMovie or Final Cut (not iTunes). However you can export your video from iMovie or Final Cut to iPod/AppleTV formats.
The Dazzle device will not work directly with iMovie or Final Cut.
ps. If all you really want to do is transfer your Laserdisc videos to DVDs, it will be a whole lot faster & simpler to get a DVD player/recorder that has analog inputs and record directly to DVDs. There are many brands & models to choose from and many good ones are as inexpensive as the $100 you spent on the Pinnacle converter.