A few questions regarding capturing processing and archival of home VHS vid

[ido22]

After reading hours of posts on the forum...


I have around 60-80 upto 20 year old tapes analog tapes, of them a dozen or so SVHS, and the rest are VHS-C and hi8 PAL home videos.

I'm talking about old home videos, so quality isn't that good, its not catastrophic either. Some of footage was photographed handheld and rather shaky too.



Capturing:
I'll be using a 6-head LG svhs deck and my sony hi8 camera feeding a canopus ADVC 110 and windv/scenalyzer.
After a few tests I've done, I am rather happy with the results, Considering they're source and age.


Editing:
I am not sure I'll be editing much, but I would like to preserve as much as quality as possible so editing would be possible in the future (hence also archiving on harddrive - I will later elaborate on this).


Post-processing:
(footage will be kept interlaced ofcourse)
I haven't yet decided what to do, and I need help here too.
I am not sure if I should keep the footage as-is, and not do anything with it besides cropping 8 pixel head scanning noise on the bottom, or process the video with filters

I'm not much of a video guru, so Its hard for me to tell when chroma needs adjustment, or if sharpness is needed.
As I don't know what output is considered to look best, altering these settings might make things worse -
(A) This is a major issue, and I would like help here.


Encoding/Archiving:
Since MPEG2 needs a high bitrate to maintain high quality, and also since some of those tapes are 180 min which wouldn't fit well on a single DVD, I had this idea of encoding them with h264.

I do not have a hd-dvd/bluray drive, but at some point in life I guess I will, so it would be easier to move burn them later on,
until then, I thought I'd archive them on a large harddrive.

Also, If I am not mistaken, H.264 handles deblocking and movement much better then mpeg2.

Am i right with this ?
(B) Would I benefit much from using H.264 instead of mpeg2 ?
(C) Would moving them from Harddisk to a HD-DVD be easy ? (can HD-DVD drives read off files, or do they have a specific layout like DVD video disc's ?
(D) if go the h.264 route, which encoder/settings would be recommended, and at what bitrate ?



I will appreciate your help.

[zoobie]

Most editors will end up reencoding your whole video when you decide to crop it. Since the full frame isn't seen on playback on tv, it's also unnecessary. I find with analog, the less processing, the better.

I wouldn't archive them to hard disk because they too fail. Then you have to go the file recovery route. I'd archive them to reliable mini-DV tape which will still be around for years to come.

[ido22]

I don't have a miniDV camera, and buying one would be much much more expensive then buying multiple harddrives for a RAID setup!

Please note that my final intention would be using BR/HDDVD for backup, but until then, archive on harddrives..