Hi8 to AVI MPEG WMV archive strategy

hgdb · Member Joined: 11 Dec 2006 Location: United States

Greetings All,

Should I convert the raw DV captured into AVI, MPEG, or WMV?

I have many tapes of both analog and digital hi8 8mm tapes. Some from my Sony analog CCD-TR93 and many from my Hi8 Digital Sony DCR-TRV120 (has digital passthrough).

I want to get them into the PC (into a digital state) before they get any older. I will not edit them right away so I think they will need to be in an editable format. I have captured some and am aware of the large gb files that are created in raw digital state, 20+GB per hour of captured tape.

What I am not sure of is what format will be best through the years to come.
AVI, MPEG, or WMV.

On a XP box:
The current capture card is STUDIO DV with firewire, it's a few years old at this point.
Intervideo WinDVD, Pinnacle Studio, Sony Vegas are available.

...I would be open to purchasing the latest proconsumer software or capture card.

What I invision is ending up with a bunch of 300-700MB files that were compressed down from 20+GB in size.
And coming back to these files time given and editing them into movies, which may or may not ultimately be placed on DVD. And maybe they will even need to be uncompressed to edit them?

Thanks in advance, let me know if you need more information.

Chris K · Member Joined: 01 Sep 2007 Location: Europe

If you want to preserve some quality and also taking into account that your source is interlaced, I would consider to first edit them and then convert them to HQ mpeg2 to burn them on DVD. Interlaced video needs a much higher bitrate. Deinterlacing for me wouldn't be a option.
I would use one single DVD for a one hour tape to keep the best quality (you use a digital camera).
Actually mpeg2 is the only option if you wan't to play your movies on a stand-alone TV unless you have a DVD player which support DivX. Still you would have to give in a lot of the original quality then.
Your capture card already captures native DV so I don't think it will be necessary to buy other hardware. Sure there are cards with the option to write mpeg2 directly to disk but editting mpeg2 is very limited and encode quality doesn't equal that of good software encoders.

zoobie · Posted: Sep 04, 2007 18:10

DV-AVI put onto mini-DV tape.
Do not store anything on hard drives.
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guns1inger · Member Joined: 01 Apr 2004 Location: Miskatonic U

For playback, mpeg-2 authored as DVD is the most universally playable at this time.

For archiving, Zoobie is spot on. Put them back onto mini-DV tape and store is a cool, dry, dark environment.

WMV, mpeg-2, Xvid/Divx etc are all lossy. They will throw away data and reduce the quality to some degree. They are also poor choices if you intend to do anything with the files at a later date, as the degrade very quickly with repeated encodings.

DV is not perfect, and it is also lossy, however is less so that your other options, designed for editing, and DV tapes are cheap and reliable.
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hgdb · Member Joined: 11 Dec 2006 Location: United States

Thanks for the responses.

So...edit them in their raw avi state from the camcorder captured onto the pc, and then convert them to mpeg2.

How would the convert to mpeg2 be accomplished?