Capturing Home Videos Questions

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Before the questions, my goal is to take some tapes from Sony 8mm (camcorder) and some VHS tapes from home and convert them to a digital format.

Each of these is about 2 hours long and the VHS tapes were recorded in SP NOT EP.

First question, will 80 gigs of space be enough for all this?

Second, what resolution should I capture them at? Keep in mind the camcorder has an S video output while the VHS uses the RCA cable types.

Third, what format should I keep them in? I want to keep the highest possible quality right now since I may later edit them.

Fourth, once I have capture them and stored the origionals, what program(s) should I use to filter them since these are a few years old and on a VHS or 8mm? Is there any software which can also go through each frame and sharpen them up a bit?, because I've used the sharpen feature in Adobe Photoshop for some images and it seems to work pretty well.

Fifth, do you have any other tips for me so my capturing goes better? (Possibly from past experiences?)

Thanks in advance.
AgaBoogaBoo
ankygupta@hotmail.com

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Any answers?

[mp3superfreak]

I usually capture first to my Canon ZR10 camcorder, then import full AVI 720x480 into Vegas Video. Depending on the video content (not action vs. fast action), I use (1)TMPGEnc's "Low Resolution DVD" setting, (2) 1/2 D1 352x480 mpeg2 at 3.5mb/s max VBR, or (3) DVD quality 720x480 mpeg2 at 7mb/s VBR. It really depends on the source.

There is some good info on This Post

Also, your first question is impossible to answer, b/c we don't know what you are using to capture the video (program, capture device, etc). Vegas captures AVI 720x480 at 3.5mb/s, but other programs with "less compressed" AVI codecs will require 25mb/s or so.

As for sharpening, Vegas Video has this function built in. It does help, but drastically increases encoding time.

These settings above are good for DVD authoring. You didn't really state what you wanted to do with the captured video other than back up. If it's just to preserve the video, you may want to use AVI.

[donpedro]

No experience here with analog capture (meaning me)... but here are some thoughts.

1. I have DV camcorder and best AVI DV file that is 720x480 for NTSC will take around 200MB per 1 minute. This is lossless capture from DV camcorder.

2. So 720x480 is DVD resulotion (no quality, just resolution).

3. For editing DV AVI is good format since it can be trimed at exact frame. MPEG2 have some issues with this and MPEG2 is compressed so any editing will lower quality even more.

4. I can use my DV camcorder to pass analog S-Video through (never done that) so I can use it as capture device.

I hope this will help even that it is not what you asked.

[D_Knife]

for the sharpening question - there is a Xsharpen 3rd party filter that is as good or better than the Photoshop equivalent - export the filtered files as HuffyUV to keep quality

Trouble is that most likely you will need ANOTHER 80Gb drive to hold the vids - Huffy is great quality but heavy on the space used