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  1. Member kreg's Avatar
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    Apr 2001
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    Got some old family video on VHS. I am not new to the work required to do a good capture from VHS. My real reason for this post, is just to hear some opinions on what a good destination format would be to choose, as a new "source video" format for the long run.

    In other words, do you think high quality Xvid files would make good new "source video" for the future? I don't really want to convert them to DVD, but if someone in the family wanted that, do you think Xvid's would make good source material?

    Maybe even someday blu-ray. Not for high def purposes, but because 10 years form now that's the convenient living room format.

    Perhaps it'd be someones opinion that a couple formats would be good new destination formats. Maybe some mpeg2's and some Xvid's, then store them all on dvdr's as video files (not authored discs) in the fire safe.

    Any thoughts?

    Thanks,
    -Kreg
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  2. Always Watching guns1inger's Avatar
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    What are you going to do with them ?

    If you are planning to edit them or work with them in the future then DV, or even better, a lossless format, would be preferable. You pay a size premium, but you don't sacrifice the quality down the track.

    If you just want to preserve them for watching, H.264 at a decent bitrate would be your best bet. It gives you the best size for quality ratio, and can be authored ready for blu-ray or something better down the track.

    Personally, I suspect something better will come along long before I am tempted to buy a blu-ray box.
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  3. Member kreg's Avatar
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    Good point about storing lossless at a cost for more storage space. I do want to have them avail down the road to transfer them to whatever may be needed someday. I don't know anything about DV, but other lossless formats i've used, like huffyuv would be heaps of storage space needed. I'd say going for that would be based on the idea of editing them again someday. Which I suppose, would be possible.

    I'll look more into what DV is. But in general, yes I just want to store for watching in the future. However as I'm sure you can agree, it would be foolish to think i'd never want to edit them again. And I would agree that Xvid and such would be a terrible format to edit with.
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  4. Member kreg's Avatar
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    I've looked into what DV is. Makes sense to me to try and have DV copies of the video for future down the road editing and re-encoding.

    I do not own any DV hardware. I'm just using a simple BT/Conexant and doing plain old huffyuv to capture 352x480 video from the VHS. This is what I use to later send through a series of filters in virtualdub and then later encode to Xvid for watching on the media center and sharing with family.

    Could I also use the huffyuv source video to encode to DV? the huffyuv videos are too large for long term storage (in my opinion). However it seems DV is considered an acceptable editing format. If the size of DV is much smaller than the big old raw huffyuv captures, then that would make sense to me.

    I tried to convert a huffyuv, with no filters at all, to a DVsoft, but virtualdub kept telling me "the source image format is not acceptable. error code -2"

    Any ideas?
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  5. Member edDV's Avatar
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    Mar 2004
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    Have you capped the tapes yet? If not, hardware analog to DV converters (Canopus ADVC, ADS Pyro, Datavideo etc.) cost around $100-300 (can be bought and resold on ebay) or MiniDV/Digital8 camcorder with "analog pass through" feature can cap analog to DV realtime.

    You can convert Huffyuv to DV with a video for windows DV codec but encoding time will be significant.
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  6. Member
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    Kreg: How many VHS tapes do you have to convert?
    I have the same situation here in wanting to get the footage off a bunch of old VHS source tapes. I think the easiest is to get a DVD recorder and just go directly to DVD-R. Then you've at least got the footage safely transfered on a format that will be good for many years to come. It's not going to be perfect, but it's quick and you get that footage backed up ASAP.

    If you want to be able to edit it, then in addition to the DVD recorder, you should also consider capturing from VHS into DV format. Buy an external hard drive and with a 500GB drive you'll be able to store many hours of VHS footage. Keep the drive just for family video and back the drive up if at all possible. DV eats up about 13GB per hour of footage. You'll be very happy with DV quality for home use.

    Then if you want to edit it later you can author it onto whatever the flavour-of-the-month codec/device is at the time. But since it's "priceless footage", I would want to get it backed up a couple of times with one copy or hard drive stored offsite.

    Good luck.

    Keith
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  7. Member
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    Yeah my brother wanted to do the same and the easiest way was to burn it direct to a dvd recorder. The quality of vhs is nothing special so if you burn it to a digital format you'll see the true quality. Also once it was on dvd it was easy to get it on to a pc. I have a fear of external hard drives after my friends 500gb drive got zapped when he was going through the airport! A lot to be said for a physical copy of something!
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  8. Member wtsinnc's Avatar
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    I have transferred approximately thirty VHS tapes to DVD using a standard VHS vcr (to) my Panasonic DMR-E80H using the Pannys' editing features whenever necessary, then transferring the finished product to disc. Some of the transfers are now more than six years old and although I can't say that I've checked most of them recently, the ones I have played did so without any noticeable problem. Because the E80H is (again) having trouble reading a blank disc (the disc drive has been replaced twice), I'm looking at the Philips unit with HDD but have some reservations about a missing feature that I really like in the Panasonic; flexible record.

    Anyway, I recommend transferring to DVD as from there you can later transfer again to a different format if desired and besides, having the material on DVD makes for more convenient viewing and eliminates the risk of damage to the fragile and aging tapes. The important thing is to get it done while the tapes are still in good condition.
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