8mm to dvd using canopus advc50

[drakefamily2]

Need some help, am a newbie. Have acquired a canopus advc50 capture card, now need some help. What software do i need to convert my old 8mm camcorder tapes. Most of tapes are 2 hours so how much hard drive will i need. I don't really want to do editing, just get my tapes on dvd the easiest way. Thanks.

[anitract]

The easiest isn't the canopus advc-50 I can tell you that much. You'd probably want an mpeg2 capture card. As it stands, you will need to spend a lot of time encoding all those DV caps into mpeg2....of course, your output would arguably be very good.

I can't say too much about the software. But if you are going to be working with many hours of video at a time, you will need a lot of space. If it was me, I'd get a HD just for the caps of around 300-350gb.

[drakefamily2]

So a bigger hard drive is the first thing i'll need. What about software, any advice? I saw windv mentioned, anybody using it?

[redwudz]

I believe you need a Firewire card with that device, I use a ADVC-100 that is similar. DV takes about 13GB per hour hard drive space. You can use WinDV to transfer the DV to your hard drive. If you don't need to edit, just convert to MPEG-2 with an encoder like TMPGEnc. Then you would need to author it to DVD format and burn.

If you want an easy way, convert the DV with DivxToDVD to a DVD. A freeware version is available on the page I linked to.

If you want to do some editing, I like VirtualDub Mod. You will need a DV codec like the Panasonic DV Codec to use VDM. Then you can either save the edited version or frameserve it to an encoder like TMPGEnc. This saves drive space as the edited version goes directly to the encoder with no in-between file.

[drakefamily2]

So the easy way is download from source using windv and convert and write to dvd with convrtxtodvd. sounds easy enough. Any particular firewire card?