Seek High Quality Capture to MPEG4 Service Provider!

[bradeso]

Guys,

I know this group is all about DIY, but I've been intending to take 20-30 VHS / Hi8 home video / Tapes for years and still these tapes sit in a bin.

I'm looking for recommendations on folks I can go to that will do a VERY high quality job of converting and where possible improving the quality of my tapes (video and audio noise, color and sound filtering / reduction where appropriate) and then convert (using high quality codecs) to an MPEG-4 file. I would like these stored to a portable hard drive that I can then use to do my own editing and streaming, etc.

I see lots of cautions in here about interlacing, capture, playback, conversion,etc. I'm looking for someone who knows how to do this RIGHT and is trustworthy and careful.

Thanks for any tips / advice on who to seek out.

Regards,

-brad

[jagabo]

Doing it right would not include saving as MPEG 4. That is meant as a final delivery format and is not edit friendly.

[bradeso]

What would be the ideal, cleaned-up format to save to? Bear in mind that one reason I want MPEG4 is that I can easily stream this file type across the devices on my home network easier than VOB or ISO.

[aedipuss]

for editing you'd be better of with DVavi format, but it's 13GB per hour size would fill a fairly large hard drive or two. you might go to a codec like mpeg-2 which isn't overly compressed, can still be edited, and could be streamed. mpeg-2's dvd resolution and bitrate would be high enough to cover any of the tapes you are converting with no loss.

the cost is not going to be cheap though, an average 2hr tape conversion is in the ballpark of $25-30 apiece, for straight transfers, cleaning them up will add to the price.