Help with old camcorder tape conversions?

[Jacob Grenoble]

The type of tape is the kind that you could put inside a kind of adapter that was a vhs tape that you could then watch on any vcr.(it was a sony camcorder if that helps, also he still has a type of sony vcr that plays only the little tapes the camcorder plays)

The question is my father wants my help converting all our old family videos to DVD's to distribute to the family. I need help in choosing all the necessary equipment and software. I don't need all the newest and greatest stuff, I just need to make quality DVD's.

Here are the things I think he needs
1.dvd burner
2.video capture card
3.extra hard drive (just guessing video conversion uses a load of space)
4.software (here is where I really come up short, I got no clue?)

I know this a lot to ask, but any suggestions would really be appreciated?

Thanks

[disturbed1]

The format is VHS-C. It's not all that great

Now, you have many many options as to how to go about this.

The easy way is to grab a USB-2 hardware mpeg encoding device. It's a WYSIWYG. The quality can leave a little to be desired. But most of these devices create an Mpeg2 video stream with (your choice) PCM audio, or Mpeg2 audio. This will be drag and drop ready for what ever software comes bundled with your burner and/or the USB device.

Another easy way, would be to buy one of the Panasonic settop DVD recorders. Hook you player to the device, put a blank disc in the Panasonic, hit record, then hit play. All done.

The hard(er) way would be to capture in avi, edit, filter, encode. Depending on you PC specs and filters used, you can spend 4-24 hours per each hour of video tape. This will yield the absolute best result, barring your skills as an editor/encoder.

Since I'm assuming your a newbee, I wouldn't break the bank on this project, you can get an ATI TV Wonder for ~$50, then the burner should come with enough software to capture and author.

If you are wanting to spend some dollars on this project, check out some of Canopus's products. Thier AV to DV converters are great, and they have some of the better consumer level RT Mpeg encoder boards. If you're Bill Gates son, grab either an SDI card, or an Optibase encoder board.

[erayboul]

The type of tape you are referring to is VHS-C. The first thing that you might want to consider is that since you don't already have the DVD burner, capture card, and so on, it might be cheaper to invest in a set-top DVD recorder. I have the Panasonic DMR-HS2. I don't believe that it is manufactured any longer, but Panasonic makes nice recorders.

If you choose to do conversions on the PC, then I can try to make some recommendations.

1. DVD burner: The Pioneer DVR-106D is an excellent dual-format recorder. My burner is assembled and branded as a LaCie, but is actually a DVR-106D in the enclosure.

2. Capture card: I can't make recommendations here. My MiniDV camcorder supports passthrough to DV, so I don't need a capture card, but if I were to buy one I might buy the Canopus ADVC-55 (requires Firewire on the PC).

3. Extra hard drive: the raw DV AVI files that you generate during the capture process consume about 13 GB per hour. You'll also need to leave space for authoring the DVD project (some programs may need as much as 18 GB). The drive should be a 7200 rpm model. My external drive is a 160 GB Firewire model made by Maxtor. If you have sufficient free space on your existing drive then you may be able to capture to it. Make sure that you shut down all of the other applications that you can. Otherwise, when they try to write to the hard drive, you may drop frames during the capture.

4. Software: There are so many choices. I personally use Adobe Premiere 6.5 for editing, but there are cheaper/simpler solutions. Editing may not be required if you just want a straight transfer. For encoding to MPEG2, I would recommend TMPGenc Plus, and for DVD authoring I would recommend TMPGenc DVD Author. Check out the Tools section on the left-hand side of this page.

[macleod]

I would recommend searching through this forum to assist in making the determination.

I ahve done both, cap card captures and hardware dvd recorder captures. Hands down, hardware captures with a standalone recorder like the panasonic E30 win.

I am doing this professionally and here is what I do:

Take source (vhs,hi8,vhs-c, etc.) and record in 1 or 2 hour mode on the panny. I record to ram disks (dvd rom/ram drive is about $30 and rewriteable ram discs are about $4 apiece). Put them on my computer, edit with TMPGENC DVD Author, and then burn to DVD-r.

If you want to know more specific costs for my particular setup, do a search with my user name (look for all posts) and I detailed out the cost, etc. for doing hardware conversions.