Best Practices for Video Capture and Conversion

[GregK]

First I apologize for this question. It's too generic and requires an opinion. That said, please feel free to suggest search arguments, or provide high level conceptual answers, which is what I'm looking for.

I, like many, have older video tapes of my kids growing up. Some VHS, some Hi-8 and some Digital 8. I'd really like to hear of best practices to avoid doing it "wrong".

I intend to capture by using my Sony Camcorder. It will either take input from a VCR or else play all my tapes. In the process it digitizes the content and outputs it as Digital Video (DV) through Firewire. I've a computer and lots of drive space to hold the output. I typically use Pinnacle Studio although my version is slightly outdated. I also have Sony ?MovieMaker?.

The issue is what to do next. DV is very large and I'll need to transcode. There seem to be two main choices:
1) MPEG-2 (DVD) - seems like a good choice because then I can create DVD's which are easily playable. Burned DVD's seem to have a poor lifetime or at least can be prone to errors within a couple of years so there are dangers from an archival perspective.
2) MPEG-4 / DIVX - It has better compression but precludes creating a DVD and dropping it into a player, however for archival purposes it would make storing it on a hard drive (or two) much easier.

Here are the specific questions (and again I apologize, please just brief technical answers)
1) Which format might be preferred and why? Is there another format I should consider? I think it all works out to be a balance between quality and size. Clearly DV would be best but is just too large. The goal would be maximum possible quality and yet manageable file sizes. The second major factor is how universally the created file can be played.
2) I'm assuming that creating a DVD and then transcoding that into DIVX would create inferior quality but perhaps I should consider creating a DVD and then also creating DIVX for better storage. Is the transcoding assumption correct?
3) Is there a significant advantage to purchasing a premium codec for this, either MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 / DIVX? Are there significant differences in Codecs?

Thank you very much for any suggestions.

[redwudz]

1. Myself, I would use MPEG-2 and a DVD. And I would also archive my DV tapes for future editing. You can convert to Xvid/Divx and get a set top Divx player, but MPEG-2 will usually be better quality.

2. If you convert from Divx><MPEG-2, that's 'encoding'. Transcoding is what programs like DVD Shrink do. If you want or need a smaller filesize, Divx/Xvid may be fine for your uses.

Burned DVDs actually have a very good lifespan, as long as you use quality DVD media.
A hard drive is more likely to die before a good quality DVD will.

3. You might purchase a MPEG-2 encoder program if you like. The freeware MPEG-2 encoders like HC will produce about the same quality, some say better. With Divx/Xvid, it's difficult to tell them apart for quality. But a Divx encoder doesn't cost much either.

For your purposes, you might look into a all-in-one, editing, encoding, and authoring program. Something similar to Pinnacle Studio, maybe, but newer.

[Krispy Kritter]

MPEG-2 on DVD would be the ideal way to go. And as redwudz pointed out, it would be very beneficial to make backups of the original data as you go onto DVD or HDD. Then if you ever need another copy or want to do something different with the video, you have it handy without having to perform the capture process again (assuming the original tapes survive).