Stupid question, but I will ask :)

[LSchafroth]

My friend has a 8mm camera with about 30 tapes. He wants me to convert them to DV format with my GRD94US camera's passthrough.

I get 720x480 files wtih 13Gb per hour. He wants to keep the DV format AVI file for a "Master" and experiment with converting and DVD authoring later.

Since the files are huge, he has no problem burning them to dual layer DVD's and splitting them if need be. (he wants to, so I guess....)

Could I load the AVI into VDMod, resize to 352x480 and do a direct stream copy? Would that reduce the file size for him?

LS

PS Don't laugh, it's what he wants.

[junkmalle]

No, DV only supports 720x480 (NTSC) and 720x576 (PAL). And "Direct Stream Copy" means it simply copies each frame without making any changes and without decompressing and recompressing the data.

[overclockxp]

13*30=390GB

All he needs is a couple of these.

[snafu099]

I almost always try to give others what they want even if I think it is not the most practical, efficient or best way to do it in "my" thinking.

For the project you are describing I would ask you friend to provide an external high capacity hard drive to store the files on. As this will be a time consuming project I doubt that you will want to do it all at once but in increments. Once he has had time to "play" with whatever you can fit on one hard drive, he may reconsider how he wants to proceed.

However, if I had the $ resouces to do it and the source tapes were "priceless/unreplaceable" content, his thinking to me is very understandable. Shelf life of cd/dvd media has not been proven, yet I have old hdd that are 20+ yrs old that still work and if not in constant use make faily "safe" data storage. I have not expienced a hard drive going bad just sitting on a shelf but I have for cd and dvd

[SaSi]

Keeping the DV AVI as master is understandable, however resizing the AVI down to reduce the file size - using a different codec - defeats the original purpose.

If 13Gb per hour is impractical, I would re-encode the DV captures into high quality DivX 5.2 AVI files. Despite the general belief, DivX (MPEG-4) in high bitrate is a very high quality codec.

You can open the DV AVI in VDUB, chose full processing mode for both audio and video, save audio uncompressed (most compatible) and configure DivX for Constant quality encode with a Q factor between 3 and 4. Chose a forced key frame every 5 frames to increase editability of the files without further need for re-encoding.

This will give you equally high (almost) quality AVI files at a fraction of the size (~3-5 Gb per hour).

[takeshi]

I'd seriously suggest a different approach unless there is a strong reason for preserving every second of all 30 hours of material at once (which there very well could be). Unless, of course, your friend can provide the massive amount of storage needed.

[dcsos]

I do the following.
I set a timer for 1/2 hour and stop my capture at 30:00
the resultant 6.5 gig file saves to one Dual Layer Blank

Cheap, permananent archival storage

I reassemble the hour show on the timeline of VEGAS and make MPEG-2 after backing up the DV captures in these half hour segments

Sure beats harddrives

also is cheaper than BLU-RAY (the new phillips drive holds 23 gig on one side!) the OPU81 Blu-ray Disc is kina pricey tho'

[DaveS]

I'd seriously suggest a different approach unless there is a strong reason for preserving every second of all 30 hours of material at once (which there very well could be). Unless, of course, your friend can provide the massive amount of storage needed.

and, for the price of the hard drive to store all 30 hours, the friend could also buy an advc100 or other and do this himself 'realtime'...depends on other factors, etc. also

[rkr1958]

I do something similar for the 20-hours, 20 DV tapes, that my wife and I have shot of our son and family since he was born in January 2001. After I fill up a 1-hour DV tape, I then capture it to my computer in 3-avi segments of 20 minutes & 50-seconds. The last segment is usually a little less (the actually footage is a little over 61-minutes per tape). I then make 2-sets of 3-DVDR burns. I keep one at home and take one to work to store.

If I wish to put together a home movie of vacation or Christmas footage I get those sets of discs that cover the timeframes of interest. I'm load them in my DVD drive and find was segment for each DVDR I want, usually not more than 3 or 4-minutes per disc. In the past I've used virtualdub to "edit-out" the portion I want and frameserve that to TMPGEnc Plus for encoding. Now that I'm using CCE-Basic I'll guess I'll have to use avsync.

Anyway ... bottom line, that footage to me is priceless ... and $3 or $4 bucks (6 DVDRs) to make two backups of a tape is well worth it. Even a couple of years ago when it was ($12 to $21 because media was more expensive) it was worth it.

[Bucky_Katt]

I don't get it. Connect his 8mm camera to your camera and record them on DV tape, which is AVI and give him the tapes.

[MOVIEGEEK]

I second putting them on a HD,DVDR's can go bad in as little as 3 months depending on who made them.
Second choice would be miniDV tape,I have magnetic tapes that are still fine after 25 years.
300GB external HD=$300US
30 miniDV tapes=$240US
Keeping family videos forever=priceless