Advice on Capture Card wanted / VHS to VCD/DVD

[geetarz]

I've been beating my head against the analog to digital barrier for a
half year now and feeling a little overwhelmed. So many conflicting
reports - one person says such-and-such works, the next person says it
doesn't.

My goal here is to transfer my huge collection of (mainly older) VHS
and SVHS tapes to VideoCD and soon, DVD with the new Pioneer drive.
Few of these tapes are from broadcast (most are home movies) and a
signifigant number are 2nd or 3rd generation copies from other family
members' home movies. I'd like to get these transferred before they
all turn to dust.

I've been a Dazzle II user for about 6 months now, VideoCD creation is
a snap most of the time, but many of my older, multi generation tapes
create horrible a/v sync problems with the Dazzle. I won't detail all
the fixes I've tried, but rest assured I've tried them all, even
including buying outside boxes to restore video sync, etc. It's
running on a purpose built W98 P3/950 system with dual 7200RPM drives
in a RAID array for 2x write speed, so processor speed and throughput
aren't a problem.

Is there a clear choice for a card that offers bulletproof video
capture at the best quality, without a lot of time wasted? I don't
have the time to spend countless hours diddling with the mechanics of
the process - there are folks who love to spend their time tinkering
on their car, me I want to get in and turn the key as I have other
things to do . Same thing here, all I want to do is transfer these
tapes to VideoCD or DVD (depending on the quality), maybe a few simple
edits and add titles at the beginning and that's it. The software
provided with the Dazzle is perfect for my uses. Don't need digital
video input, don't need or care for fancy transitions or any of that
stuff.

Are there any cards that compress in real time as the Dazzle does?
Will I get better results with uncompressed capture and software
encoding?

Obviously I'd love to find a low cost solution, but I'm willing to pay
more for something that provides higher quality and works more
quickly. And especially something that works flawlessly, I really
don't want to spend hours diddling with all sorts of workarounds and
fixes, I'd much rather spend time actually transferring stuff. If I
could get some reliable information about the Apple and Compaq systems
I'd even be inclined to pick up one of those, if they work as
advertised.

Of particular concern is the time I can get on the new Pioneer DVD
drive. Encoding from VHS can I put 2 hours on a DVD? Since I won't
need a super high data rate for VHS it seems I will be able to but
still haven't gotten a clear answer to this.

Any help or advice is appreciated!

[WMike]

You're gonna find (if you haven't already) that whatever method you choose is a trade off between quality, space and ease.

I'm doing just what you are describing with a library of over 500 old movies on VHS, taped at the slowest speed. I found that to get the minimal quality I wanted, I needed to make SVCD's. If you don't care as much about quality, VCD will work fine and is not that difficult to do, and will use less CD space.

I use the PCTV capture card, compress with Huffyuv (free), edit in VirtualDub (free), frameserve to TMPGEnc (free), cut with TMPGE (free still), burn with Nero (cheap-free ) on blanks that run about $.30 each. Total investment aside from the computer that I already had, <$200.

I found that it could be time intensive until I figured out the procedure/software/settings that worked for me. Now that I have that in place, I am able to produce eight-two hour movies/week on average, with no more thinking/hassle than I want to put toward's it.

Good luck
Mike

[Iview]

WMike,
I am also a DVC II user, I find that if I capture from old VHS tape, the audio and video goes out of sync a little. My workaround is go into Customize, uncheck Record Audio box and check the Record Audio to Seperate File box. After capture, you will find your audio appears on a seperate time-line and if it is out of sync you can slide it back in position. Then produce movie with Audio-Video multiplexed. I know it is crude, but it works for me.
By the way, I am looking forward to write to DVD too, with 4.7G, it is possible to fit 2 hours of video on one disc, all depends on the bitrate. But when the dual layers DVD (9G) is available, I am sure you can fit more than 2 hours on one disc. I, personally is waiting for the DVD+RW (it is supose to be more compatible with stand-alone DVD players), due to be out later this year, and do a comparison with the DVD-R before I put down any money.