VCR to DV Best practices?

[MAXIMUS01CAN]

Howdy All,

I have a Sony DCR-PC9 DV camcorder and I'm thinking about capturing all my old VHS movies and burning them to DVD.....the problem I'm seeing is that I can only capture 1 hour on my DV Tape in SP and 1.5 hrs in LP. Most of these home movies/videos are over 1.5 hrs long. What's the take on the best way to do this? Break up the Video and deal with each clip in the DVD editing software or does some other smarty pants have a better idea I havn't thought of yet

Regards,
Max

[jg0001]

Figure out if your DV camera can do pass-through encoding to DV.

Basically, what this means is it takes the analog input (from the VCR), but instead of recording it to mini-DV tape, it just directly outputs it on the DV FireWire line. You DON'T need to record to tape at all this way. My camera (a Panasonic 953) requires me to go into "VCR" mode (the playback mode) and set DV output to ON. If yours cannot do this, then you will be required to record to tape first, in 60 or 90 minute blocks.

I then use Scenalyzer to 'capture/receive' the DV stream into DV-AVI type 2 (I recommend this, passthrough or not) and it maintains audio-video sync perfectly even with poor analog source tapes (which I could not get recording to tape then playing the tape into Studio 8).

If using pass-through, you can record for many hours on end without care (you can even set Scenalyzer to break the capture into chunks, but I use NTFS so leave it as one big chunk).

Once you have the DV-AVI file, you can bring it into another program (I use Studio 8) and clean up the scenes or patch together two or more tapes of recordings (I recommend a two-minute overlap when recording each tape if you can't do pass-through; you will then have plenty of room to find a good spot to patch it back together).

Enjoy

[MAXIMUS01CAN]

Thanks JG,

Pretty much positive my sony will do the pass through and I'm hoping that I can just capture right to Ulead Video Studio 7 and go from there. If the capturing in Ulead VS7 isn't up to snuff I might look at Scenalyzer to capture. Anyways thanks for the tips.

Max

[jg0001]

On another forum, I had a long conversation about problems trying to bring in DV data that was generated from an analog source. Studio 8 (note: the smileys in my prior post should all have been eights!) kept getting laggy on me which I found baffling (b/c it doesn't do it on my mini-DV imports of home movies).

Anyway... I wasted a lot of time trying this nine different ways before someone suggested I try Scenalyzer b/c it takes special care to lock audio/video while imported... I tried it and it worked perfectly. I then open the resulting file in Studio, do a little clean up, and re-export as DV-AVI. This becomes my new master file for the project. (I always edit in DV-AVI in Studio, then convert it using TMPG).