A Newbee wants to say hello and thanks, and offer opinions

[Shannafey]

I have been a lurker on this forum for quite some time and have to say that it has been incredibly useful to me and I thank you all for the wealth of good information you have provided me with. I wanted to tell you all what I have
found in tests I have done and share some of my insights with you too. Hopefully some of you might find some of this useful. First of all, my system:

AMD K6-2/350
160mb Ram
6 gb system HD
30 gb 7200rpm Seagate HD for Video
32X CD-Rom
Acer 2X CDRW
Pinnacle DC10+
Pinnacle Studio DV
Pioneer DV-333 DVD Player

I had had the base system, I know it's old, but it does the trick, and I have been shooting tons of Hi8 tapes of home movies for years and I recently picked up a Sony PC100 DV to upgrade. I am a professional video producer, so I do too much editing at work to want to edit my home movies,
but as I get older and the tapes are getting older as well, I started thinking I wanted to have them in a format that will last and at the same time, put them in a watchable form. After I started with the home movies, I also found that my collection of movies and TV shows on tape was getting out of hand, causing a major shortage of space and at the same time, some were over 15 years old and starting to show their age, especially since they were in SLP mode. A lot of that stuff was priceless to me, since it was unavailable on VHS or DVD, so I started dumping them to disc as well. While going over all the information on the site about VCDs, SVCDs, XVCDs, etc., I decided that I wanted a format that was very standardized so that I could play it on virtually any system, now and in the future, even though my own personal Pioneer player played about everything you put in it. I did several tests with CDRW tests, just playing around. I didn't like the quality I got from SVCDs in tests I ran. I constantly found artifacting, with even the slightest of motions, until I finally got some good specs from somebody on the forum. Even then, I felt like VCD is a more compatible format with most systems, and besides, you get a lot more on a disc, and I had hours of hours of stuff to transfer. I will use SVCD, however, for my DV tapes when I eventually start editing them.

I love the Studio DC10+ card. It is cheap and does the trick, and this is why I also picked up the Studio DV card for my firewire needs. I have a lot of conflictions with other posters, though. First of all, you don't need to
dump in VHS tape in at 640 x 480 if you are going to VCD. VHS doesn't have that kind of resolution, and secondly, VCD is 352 x 240, so you are compressing the image resolution in the long run. This takes processing time, and I have also found that the end result isn't as good as if you dumped it in at the right resolution in the first place. With the DC10+ card we have a problem, you can only go 320 x 240 or 640 x 480, so I use the 320 x 240. Yes, it is a little below the quality of VCD, but not much, and as I have said, I find it to be better than dumping it in at the higher resolution in the first place. Another issue I have is with compression. You can only dump 2 gig in at a time with that card. Obviously, the more you compress it, the more time you get, but you would also think that you sacrifice quality. With the preset 320 x 240 the compression is something like 1:24, then of course it is
compressed again at the mpeg stage. I want to be able to leave the tape rolling and be able to dump a lot of material in at one time, so I don't want to be bothered to keep restarting the capture, so I thought that some
degradation in quality would be worth it, to get more dumped in at one time. Some of you may disagree with this, but I did several tests at lower compression captures before going to mpeg and I did not see enough of a
difference in the image quality to sacrifice capture time. I have several store bought VCDs, like the Star Wars trilogy and some Asian stuff and I feel like my VCDs are of the same quality if not better. To go forward here, after
capturing at the preset 320 x 240 (I do, however change the audio to 44khz 16bit stereo, so in a sense it is not the preset, I just use the preset video settings), I use the VCD template in TMPG (as most of you know, Pinnacle's mpeg compression is worthless), and I then use Nero to burn. I
used to use Easy CD Creator 4, but I find Nero to be much more stable, so that is all I use now. I am sure some of you will debate these methods, but it works for me, and again, I thank the people of this forum for giving me
such great insight and knowledge in my quest to eliminate video tapes from my life altogether. Thanks again, and feel free to write with any questions or thoughts.
SH

[x2pacalypsehalx]

I speak for everyone saying thats what were here for...

[thxkid]

I agree except one point I use SVCD all the time with near DVD quality results, could be because I use the hardware encoder Happuage PVR which encodes directly to MPEG2, then I demux to a SVCD.
If you are saving priceless moments you might try using a higher bitrate on VCD I find 1150 is just OK I get no artifacts if I use the 2520 bitrate template I made for TMPGE. I also view these results back on a 36in JVC.
I have also found great results if I capture to DIVX AVI before encoding to MPEG1 VCD. Be patient it takes time to get this down I have been making VCD's and SVCD's for over 2 years now and I keep learning all the time also, I go back and look at some of the 1st VCD's I did, gosh do they suck, so practice does make perfect.

[KingJohn]

The only problem with VCD its going to be be replaced by DVD . I refer to the DVD writer that is now available, and like all things the price is going to tumble in time. Might be worth waiting until next year, if DVD writers were cheap then we would all be transferring them to DVD and the humble VCD would not be as popular again.

When blank cdr's came out the were around £7 $11 or so, now they are £0.20 $0.32 or less, event for the good makes.

I think blank DVD's are currently £8, 2 years from now and they will also be £0.20 each. If we have not moved over to solid state memory packs, then the DVD is going to become the method of transferring your tapes.

Hang on a little while...