VCD and SVCD vs Digital 8m a MAJOR concern

[Nikos]

I have old VHS tapes I want to archive, obviously I could use either Digital 8, VCD or SVCD...but my concern is when i look at the COMPARISONS sheet on this site which says

VCD
60% of the original quality

this is saying that the copy quality is 60% of the original.

Does that mean that it will only be 60% as good as my VHS original copy that is analog and over 10 years old...

this is why i wanna archive them on Hi8 Digital 8 tapes because they are almost at a 100% copy quality...

what do you all think??

[pocholin]

Well it all depends on how you capture your 10 year old tapes into the PC. Assuming you can capture them at uncompressed rate and your source displays good you could keep your resolution on SVCD or even on VCD but your encoder and filters have to be perfectly adjusted, if not VCD will loose some quality.
I'd recommend going SVCD and as a second option VCD (DVD would be the best solution, but it is still expensive).
If you back your tapes to Hi8, DV, SVHS or anyother device that uses tapes they will degrade with time (yes even Digital 8 and DV)

Hope this helps.

Alfonso

[Nikos]

i dont understand what you mean exactly, basically it takes a lot of effort to get it so the VCD copies at an almost 100% quality of the video original?

[Vejita-sama]

You got it. VHS -> VCD transfers are part art. IF you can make a perfect VHS capture then you won't lose anything (60% sounds like a lot of lost).

I would use MPEG2 because it supports interlacing thou.

Digital8 might be the best (certainly easier and faster) choice.

[Nikos]

How do you make a perfect VCR capture on a computer...?

[Vejita-sama]

Perfect VHS capture is a matter of much debate. Take a look at:

http://www.geocities.com/lukesvideo

this url focuses on cartoons but should work for live action too.

What I've found works best it to capture in the highest resolution my PC will support w/o losing frames (which on my new system) is 720x480, 29.97fps, CD quaility audio using the huffyuv codec. I then extract the audio from the AVI file, and use tooLame to encode it to MP2. I then use AVISynth to frameserve to CCE.

I have AVISynth bicubicresize to 480x480 and if necessary clip 2-5lines from the bottom of the picture (often 'VHS noise' shows up at the bottom of my captures), and encode CBR at 2700kbit/s video. Then mux w/ bbMPEG.

For me this makes a SVCD that looks as good as the original VHS. But then these are old VHS tapes (Transformers, Galaxy Rangers, etc) so the quaility is pretty poor to start with I don't think I lose 40% of the VHS quaility, but I've never tried to capture for a 'VHS master source' as it were so...