Hi8 & VCR Archival

[widemouth]

Hello All,

What I am trying to do is basically capture Video from my HI8 Camcorder to burn onto CD for the purpose of archiving and preventing quality loss that happens with Analog Magnetic tape.

Some time in the future, I'll buy a DVD burner and player but until prices come down, I want to capture as higher quality as I can now, given the limitations of my Flyvideo TV card and my CD burner.

I have no interest in VCD making as I can want higher quality capturing now for future DVD recording and I dont have a VCD player.

This is what I'm doing currently:

1) Capturing using VirtualDub using PICVideo compression at its highest quality. at 384x288 and 16Bit RGB. (Highest resolution I seem to be able to get out the TV card)

2) Converting to a MPG using TMPGEnc and using compression settings ranging from CBR&1150 Kbit/sec Bitrate or Automatic VBR at 100% quality depending on the length of the file so I can fit the MPG file onto a CD.

3) Burning the MPG onto the CD as a file.

Does anyone think I should be doing anything differently?
What comression is the best one to use in TMPEnc for the purpost of best quality storage at the smallest file?


Thanks is advance for your reply.

[Shabubu]

For best quality, and if your HD and cap card can do it, use huffyuv at 384x576 @25fps (assuming your using PAL, else its 384x480 @ 30fps), MAKE SURE TO USE YUV colour, it's signifcantly faster and the way your card caps and MPEG is encoded. Then in vdub use the smart deinterlace and bilinear resize to resize to 352x288 (or 352x240 for NTSC) and frameserve to TMPGEnc. If your wanting to transfer to DVD later, and are not making VCD's then try encoding at 1200-1300 (the bitrate roughly of VHS). Also when capping in vdub remember to enable cropping and crop out the crap at the top and bottom of the frame, and to cap with all preview turned off.