Best way to capture numerous 3-4 hr TV events?

[Roark1138]

I wish to capture/record each game of a particular baseball team during the upcoming MLB season. I plan to take those recordings, edit them, and make a series of personal highlight reels. The problem is there are 162 games and each is 3-4 hours (including pregame and postgame).

I've done quite a bit of research reading reviews, forums, as well as looking at equipment. Unfortunately, I haven't really found a solution that seems to really fit my exact needs, so I figured I'd make a post and listen to what you all thought of some specific ideas I have.

First off, I recently put together a new box, so system speed should not be a problem. I'll be running a P4-2.4GHz, 533 FSB; 512 MB DDR400 RAM; 60 GB 7200 RPM drive and a 120 GB 7200 RPM drive with 8 MB cache; run of the mill 3D gaming card.

Also, I will only be recording/capturing standard cable signals - not HDTV, digital cable, or other.

As far as some specific solutions go, I would like to toss them out and get some opinions as to what my best option(s) would be, considering a limited budget, etc. I've thought about doing one of the following:

1) Record the games on S-VHS, ouputting S-Video and analog audio to a Canopus ADVC-100, converting to firewire and capturing on PC as a high quality AVI.

2) Buying some sort of internal (ATI AIW?) or external (Pinnacle PCTV deluxe) TV tuner device that outputs to digital, then capturing the entire video on PC as an AVI.

3) Using either a PVR or VCR to output an analog signal to an MPEG2 capture board, obviously saving in MPEG2 format. Not interested in hacking the PVR, even to get the digital signal.

Each solution seems to have their own pro's and con's.

Due to the length of the games and the sheer number of them, I would prefer to initially capture the games on a device other than the PC. S-VHS would be the ideal, in my opinion, because I can capture all the games I want, store the tapes, then on my own time step through the tapes and only capture limited segments on my PC for editing.

Whereas if I captured all the games straight to the PC in an AVI format, I would use an insane amount of hardspace which would essentially force me to review the games every day or two and cut everything I don't want/need. The drive space available to store games would also shrink significantly over time.

Event scheduling is important as well. With the VCR or PVR I could program the event quickly and easily and not have to worry about it. Based on some of my reading done here, if I captured directly to the PC (space limitations aside), I would have to use some sort of capture scheduling software, most of which doesn't seem to be looked upon too favorably.

Another consideration is that if I capture directly to PC, that's 3-4 hours every night during prime time that my computer is essentially unavailable.

I suppose I've more or less convinced myself that option #1, using S-VHS, is the way to go. I guess my primary concern is the quality loss when recording to tape, outputting to a converter, etc, etc.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this particular issue? Please especially speak up if you think #1 would definitely NOT be the way to go.

I would also really like to hear thoughts on other potential options if you have them..!

[furball6969]

One thing you didn't mention is your intended output format; other than the mention of "personal highlight reels". Does that mean you're putting the video onto film strips?

For your case; the sheer volume of video needing to be captured I would probably recommend the S-VHS deck for the best quality analog recording and abundance of cheap media, not to mention the timeframe for editing the captures doesn't allow enough time do do all the work and then output to your desired format.

Since I can't really speculate on how you plan to store or archive the finished product there's really not much more I can tell you except to point yoiu to the guide to capping and authoring 6 hours of video to DVD-R that I have compiled- the link is in my sig.

[Roark1138]

Sorry, yeah, "reel" is definitely misleading. The final output would definitely not be film - it would be DVD.

[hwoodwar]

I did something similar, but not on the same scale. I recorded a two hour per episode mini-series each weeknight for two weeks strait and encoded to CVD format. This is tedious and time consuming.

From My own experiences (and for best quality), here are my suggestions:

1. Definitely capture directly in to your PC. You will loose quality, recording to tape and then capturing the output of the tape to your PC.

2. Capture to three separate files; pregame, game and postgame. It makes things easier to edit, resave and encode rather than having one big file.

3. File format, this is time consuming, but I would capture to avi either 1/2 DVD or DVD resolution to avi format (with a good compression codec, like huffyuv or mjpeg), edit and resave to mpeg-2 format before the next game. When you have enough of the edited games to fill a DVD, copy to DVD and delete the original from your hard drive.

The reason why I select avi over mpeg format is, I have seen many posts of problems editing mpeg files. If you are comfortable editing mpeg-2 files than maybe a capture card that saves directly to mpeg-2 at a higher bitrate than SVCD (definitely test to see if you like the quality first) may be a viable option option.

[flaninacupboard]

personally i would go for a hybrid option. as you say, S-vhs is cheap and easy, so tape all the games onto it. but, at the same time capture using the canopus ADVC-50 (you don't need the 100, the only extra feature is playing back the DV through it's outputs, but given you're exporting to DVD this is irrelevant) to DV. now DV takes up 12.9 gigs an hour so your 120 gig drive will give you 9 hours of recording. so delete anything you know you don't want straight away, and things you may not want too, and encode what you definitely want to mpeg2 and delete all the avi's. once the season is finished, go back and anything you missed take off of your s-vhs tapes. this way you have everything, the great stuff is top notch quality, and you don't have post capture edit problems as you would with a realtime mpeg2 card.
or wait until the official season DVD is out

[NightWing]

This may give you some ideas.

My dedicated video computer has the following setup:

AMD 1900+
(1) 10gb 7200 for OS and catch tray from Tmpeg output.
(1) 80gb 7200 quit bearing harddrive for capture. One partition large sectors.
(1) Pinnacel DC10+
AVI_IO for capture
VirDub as stitcher/frameserver.
TMPEG for compression to MPEG1 VCD compliance.

For Example. Last Saturday capture 14 hours at 320x240 29.97fps was in MJPG format covering the news that day. Would have been more but had two hours at 640x480 already on it.

Compressed the whole thing down to VCD MPG1 compilance in 1 hour blocks. Dumped off to data CD for archive.

Gave up tapes units for major capture archive about 2 years ago. But have a brand new S-VHS unit hung off of a Tivo unit just in case I need to move stuff. I forgot to record.

[SatStorm]

I see 2 solutions:

- 1 Buy S-VHS or better Digital VHS and store there. Just remember after 15 - 20 years to convert your tapes to something else

- 2 Get a PVR PCI card (like Hauppauge's Win TV PVR), grabb realtime to mpeg 2 (1/2 D1 resolution maybe is enough for this task) also buy a DVD burner and start burn DVDs. With 1/2 D1 resolution and an average bitrate about 4000kb/s, you could store about 90 - 120 min on a DVD-R with excellent picture, for a long long time

There is also a third way: Grabb and encode to a PC based solution. Cheaper (for example xvid) but it is good only for now and for yourself!

[Tagger]

You could also capture to AVI, compressed with Divx or other codec, and save to CDR for later editing. Even if the file is over 700 Mb (which it probably will be) you could use WinZip, WinAce, or WinRar to chop it up to expand over several disks. Granted, you'll have hundreds of disks by the end of the season but CDRs are real cheap (practically nill if you get a good rebate) and the quality should be acceptable.