Question about capturing VHS tape to .avi file

[rfdillon]

Folks, I have a whole lot of old VHS tape from th family growing up, and I was considering playing thfem through a VCR, and bringing them onto my PC via the ATI all in wonder 2006 PCI E Edition video card, then editing them with Pinnacle studio.

Someone told me the quality may be better if I would first connect the VCR to my Canon Elura 100 Camcorder, and taping them to DV tape, then attaching my Elura to th irewire port and bringing them over that way.

That seems a lot of work, but I would do it if the quality was noticeably approved.

Any advice or suggestions on how to best transfer these old memories to my PC so that I may edit them?

Thanks so much in advance for all your help!

[DB83]

No need to capture them to DV tape. Just use your camcorder as a pass-through device from the VCR to the PC. Connect the camcorder to the PC by firewire and capture the footage from there.

You will not directly improve the footage. That would only be possible by additional processes - applying filters atc.

There are a lot of topics in these forums on this subject so there is little point in repeating here.

[rfdillon]

Thanks so much. Today I hooked up my VCR to the Elura 100, and successfully captured the content of several video tapes to my computer's hard drive. I did have another question, however. These videos are brought in as uncompressed .avi format. Some of the footage is junk, however and I don't want to keep it. So, I would like to take the footage of each video tape, for example in Pinnacle Studio 12, cut into clips just the scenes that I want to keep, and save off those scenes separately, then delete the big .avi file. As these individual clips will one day go into the DVD format, I was wondering if I could just export a clip as an MPG2 file, then once I have all of my individual clips exported as separate MPG2 files, perhaps I could then delete the big. avi file, thus saving hard disc space and helping me to organize the important scenes into individual clips. Or, should I export the individual scenes as .avi files? Thanks so much in advance for your help!

[lordsmurf]

It's not uncompressed if it's DV.

[rfdillon]

It is not DV tape, I only used the video camera's Analog to Digital converter. It is streaming from a VHS VCR through the camera, to Pinnacle studio and written out as a .avi file.

[edDV]

It's not uncompressed if it's DV.

Your Canon camcorder converts analog VHS to a digital DV format file (i.e 720x480i 25Mb/s YCbCr) on your hard drive.

Your Pinnacle software will import the DV-AVI file. After editing, you can export to MPeg2 for DVD.

[dudul]

take a look at this site: http://vhs-to-dvd.janvesely.com/
and this: http://dvdguide.ennik.com/
I got a pretty good results with these tutorials.