Another VHS to PC question

[Emdubya]

Hi, Folks.

First, I have to say how impressed I am at the depth of knowledge present on this forum; it's quite overwhelming. I've been on the periphery of this stuff from the days when I was a kid and my father shot Standard 8 movies, to the present where I shoot (very occasional) video footage with my Canon DV camcorder, but I'm very much a "consumer" rather than an enthusiast and have no expectations for becoming very knowledgeable on the technical side.

Twenty years ago, I was shooting my young family using the ubiquitous Sony Handycam. I crudely edited these analogue tapes onto VHS when I copied them from the Handycam to my old Sharp VHS VCR. Now I want to transfer those VHS tapes to DVD, but I'd like to do a better job at editing them by capturing them to my PC first and using my video editing software.

I have about a dozen tapes to process, so I don't want to buy a lot of specialised equipment (although I don't mind some modest expenditures). I don't expect professional studio-quality results, but I don't want to regret not spending a few extra bucks every time I watch a video. Life's a compromise...



So I need some basic advice on how to do this without breaking the bank or getting lost in technical jargon. Here's what I have:

• The original video was shot on a Sony Handycam dating from 1990.
• This was copied to VHS on a Sharp 4-head VCR of the same vintage, which is still the only VCR I own (it's built like a tank).
• The VCR has composite video out only.
• My PC has an ATI All-in-Wonder video card with composite video and S-video inputs.
• My video editing software is Adobe Premiere Elements (the original stripped-down consumer product). I have to run this on my old Athlon 64/XP machine, because it won't run on my W7 computer.
• I play back from my W7 computer via HDMI through an Arcam AV receiver to a 50" plasma TV.

Other thoughts:

• I could probably borrow a newer VCR from a friend if using one with an S-video output would be beneficial.
• I have a Canon DV camcorder (tape) with S-video and DV connections - don't know whether this might be useful.
• I use my TV just for DVDs, because I don't subscribe to cable or satellite TV. So there's not much value for me in buying a fancy DVR.

So my fundamental question is: what's the opimium way for me to get these VHS videos onto my computer's hard disc so that I can edit them before burning to DVD?

All suggestions gratefully received...especially if I can understand them!

[yoda313]

@emdubya - you don't happen still have the original master handycam tapes do you? If you do that would be the best way to start. Use a camcorder that can play them back and start from square one.

If that is not possible than you have to use your dubbed tapes.

I would first do a test run with equipment you have. Just hook up your vcr to your computer with the composite cables. Run the supplied captured program from ati and capture to mpeg2 (that is the format for eventual dvd creation - the file will be a .mpg file most likely).

Check your recorded file and determine if its adequate for your needs. If it is than you are all set to go. Record your tapes in this manner.

If you have multiple scenes per tape you could decide whether you want to capture a tape a time or scene by scene. If you capture a whole tape you'll need to edit out the scenes you want to use - mpg2cut2 is one such program to cut mpg files (freeware).

Once you have your files situated then you can commence with either a straightforward authoring with one video per disc or multiple scenes on a disc. It is up to you how you want to lay it out. For freeware dvd authoring check out avstodvd or multiavchd for starters.

You should be able to directly import the captured mpg2 files into your editing program. Just remember you can't make them magically look better than how your captured file is. What you see is what you get. You can do filters and such but they tend to soften or sharpen your video and may not really enhance it all. But it depends on your perception of course. Brightening it may be all you want to do and certainly software can do that.

Also use imgburn to burn your dvds. If you don't want to order dvds online use verbatim blank dvds for best results. If you do want to buy blanks online order taiyo yuden blank dvdrs. Then burn with imgburn and that should give you the best home results you can hope for - without sending a master disc to a publishing company and doing a limited run for professional quality pressed discs (pressed discs are the type you buy new at the store with the latest movie on them - home discs are burnt not pressed and not 100% identical to commercial discs - they work but nothing is 100% certain on 100% of players for 100% of features you try to put on a home disc - you can get very close but only pressed discs have this certainty).

You can pretty much do whatever you want with it but remember your output is only as good as your input. If your equipment doesn't produce good results on your capture test try borrowing that vcr. Also if you want to invest in specialized equipment look for a tbc to improve quality. However if these are dubbed tapes to begin with and you no longer have the original tapes you can only squeeze so much out of second generation tapes. They can look good just not as good as if you started with the original source.

Some of these statements I've made tend to be generalizations. Of course your mileage may vary. It all depends on how satisfied you are with your captured video and how much editing you want to do.

One last thing if you want frame accurate editing capture in dv-avi - your ati capture program SHOULD let you do that. You can also try capturing with the freeware program virtualdub and that should let you use dv-avi if vdub can detect and use your capture card. One note dv-avi runs at 13gb/hour of video so your captured videos will be quite large. Then you'd edit the avi file with your editor and output to a mpeg2 file for dvd authoring.

Please feel free to ask more questions and we can point you in the right direction.

[Emdubya]

Yoda313, thanks for such a prompt and comprehensible reply.

The original Handycam tapes were over-written numerous times and then eventually dumped when the camera died, so I have only second generation tapes to work from.

I don't completely understand where the limiting factors are in the overall process: if the inherent image quality on the second generation tapes is higher than composite video can transmit, then it seems that I look for a VCR with S-video to borrow from the outset. If this isn't the case, then I guess that isn't a limiting factor.

I've figured out that TBC is time-based correction - if this is important and can be fixed with a $100 gadget, then it's worth doing, but how do I determine whether it's a problem?

I'll try to capture directly through Adobe Premiere Elements, other wise I suspect that I'll have difficulty keeping the audio and video tracks together. I don't know whether this has any implications for capturing in dv-avi as you mentioned. I think the video will be captured as a single scene, but Premier can cut that into scenes during editing.

I'll start experimenting this afternoon. Thanks for your support with this project!

[yoda313]

can be fixed with a $100 gadget, then it's worth doing, but how do I determine whether it's a problem?

I don't know about a 100.00 price tag. You could check ebay or amazon for a used standalone tbc. As for picture issues if the picture has tracking issues or wavy lines I believe that is what a tbc can correct to a certain degree.

if the inherent image quality on the second generation tapes is higher than composite video can transmit, then it seems that I look for a VCR with S-video to borrow from the outset.

Its not just a svideo output that would be the issue it would be the quality of the vcr that is doing the playback. The fact it has svideo SHOULD mean it should be a better playback device than the vcr you currently have but it is not a given. But if you can borrow it that would be good to do a side by side comparison.

other wise I suspect that I'll have difficulty keeping the audio and video tracks together

The synching issues wouldn't come from using a different capture program. Whatever capture program you use would use the audio video inputs on your capture card. They would be captured together in that program. If there were synch issues it would either be inherent to the tape itself, the vcr or the capture card - not the capture program. The capture program just takes what is coming in to the card itself.

Then you would import the captured video file into the program you're going to use.

Good luck on the testing. Remember you are your own client in this regard. Your expectations are all that matters in this regard. If your captured video looks ok to you then that is all that matters. To technophobes somethings might scream out at them as being inferior but to others or especially newbies if it looks ok to your eyes in the end that is all that really matters. Yes you can tweak to your hearts content but sometimes your gut instinct on what looks good is probably best. Unless you can get the equipment inexpensively or easily from a friend sometimes it can be overkill. Sometimes you do need to wrestle with it.

I guess I'm just trying to get you to see the potential risks and rewards ahead of time. The world of video is not rocket science but sometimes it is rocket science depending on the input and the output desired. Get your feet wet then you can see how far you want to dive into it. (hey it almost looks like I took a writing class! )

[PuzZLeR]

I will add to Yoda's advice.

I think we both felt "Ahh, too bad" when seeing that you don't have the original Masters. Oh well, you make do with what you have.

Normally if it's a small batch of tapes you want captured, it's not worth it to stock on equipment - just go to a transfer house instead. But get them to capture to not-so-compressed formats so you can have options later down the road, instead of them charging you more for edits and compressed formats you may not be satisfied with. (You can always edit and encode your own DvD instead).

But assuming you do it yourself...

You may not need a new, or better, VCR to capture. Your Sharp may be just as good as a prosumer deck in this case because it's the original recorder. Even a cheap VCR has the possibility of outdoing a good deck in a transfer on a given tape if the cheap VCR recorded it. Even though S-Video is superior to composite RCA yellow, I don't think an S-video output is going to make any substantial difference either in your case. S-Video makes a bigger difference on higher end content, like commercial tapes, analog TV, DvD, and onward.

By the way, which ATI do you have? There's a difference. If you have the 600 for example, you're in business. All you need are the WDM drivers and you can capture to less compressed formats with VirtualDub. Then you can experiment with filters, such as with AviSynth (free), to get the results you want.

But if you work with MPEG-2, you need to work with an MPEG dedicated editor. Yoda mentioned mpeg2cut, which is excellent advice. Other consumer editors will re-encode MPEG-2 after edits, which costs time and quality - avoid. If you want other options that are not free, but maybe more consumer friendly, you can look into VideoReDo, Womble and TMPGEnc MPEG Editor to edit MPEG-2 and prepare for DvD.

You can work with Adobe in edits, but not with MPEG-2. Use Adobe only if you choose to capture/edit DV. Although I don't own it, I have a hunch it will re-encode all MPEG-2 Source.

If you want to improve your results do look into a TBC. This will handle much of the jitter associated with analog tape, which I suspect yours will be guilty of. This has added benefits on top of better quality captures, such as removal of any false Macrovision signal and better yet - added compression to your final results (more quality per bitrate) due to less "movement" with the removal of that jitter. This is especially true if you wish to use the lossy format MPEG-2/DvD for your final result.

A good TBC for the price is the AV Toolbox AVT-8710, but it's about $215 (with B&H). Unfortunately such ware is rarely on eBaY from what I've seen. But you never know. However, I hate to break it to you - your results will suffer without one in my opinion.

But, as Yoda touched on, there is no "best" result. You are the judge of what it good in the end.

[TimA-C]

I was going to say that if it's only a dozen tapes and you're not that interested in becoming a video techie then you might do better to look at having them professionaly converted, but PuzZLeR beat me to it!

Go with the earlier advice and try a few quick samples using the equipment you have at hand and can easily borrow. If you're happy with the results then look forward to spending quite a lot of time in front of your computers and (hopefully) a lot of satisfaction when you & your family watch the end results on your telly!

You said you also have a DV camcorder with s-video and DV connections? If either of your machines has a firewire socket then you might want to try using that as your analogue to digital converter as well. There used to be a free (for private use) bit of software from a company called Ensoft (I think) that would let you do all sorts of white balance, colour and saturation adjusting etc. during capture. Saved a lot of processing time afterwards. You may want to look into that as well if you're not happy with the results from your ATI card.

Anyway, good luck and let us know how you get on.

[Emdubya]

Thanks for the continuing feedback, it's much appreciated!

The video card in my old PC is an ATI All-in-Wonder 9600; it probably dates from around 2003. Thinking back, I did do one VHS capture at around that time - this is coming back to me as I re-learn the entire process. I no doubt discovered what I discovered yesterday...that Adobe Premiere Elements will capture only DV and not analogue video, and that I must therefore use my Canon DV camcorder as an analogue-to-digital converter. I think I even bought a Firewire card for the PC specifically for this purpose (I obviously didn't realise that I could capture without using Adobe). This raises the question of which device has the better ADC, the Canon camcorder or the ATI card...

Of course, if I don't need to use Adobe to capture, then I can use my newer, more powerful PC which has an on-board ATI Radeon HD 4290 video processor which I've no doubt is superior to the 9600. Using my new PC for editing would be attractive for two reasons: first, it's much more powerful than my old machine (I'd guess about five times); and second, I've had some frustrating experiences with Adobe and would be quite happy to move on. Unfortunately, I don't have much time for experimenting with a variety of software products, and my use is so occasional that I have to deal with the learning curve every time I capture another home video. So if there's one editing package that would seem particularly well-suited to meeting my needs, please shout out! (I don't mind spending a few bucks on this if I have to).

As an aside, I'm trying to find time to experiment with Linux in order to escape from the revenue models that hardware and software manufacturers are using to exploit their consumer-base. I've got as far as installing Ubuntu on my old machine as a dual boot alongside XP. This was a "learning experience" in itself and I don't think I'm ready to jump into a Linux video editor yet (although I could be over-estimating that additional learning curve), but I mention it in case there's a video editor that's available for both platforms which would give me a convenient transition in the future. Hmmm, maybe I'm introducing too many variables here...

Interesting comments about staying with composite video and my old VCR. It was certainly a good machine in its day, albeit at the consumer level.


It seems that I have a couple of simple choices. In the short-term:

• I could do a quick and dirty capture from either VCR through my DV camcorder into Adobe on my old PC and hope for the best;
• I could try different capturing software to get the benefit of my more powerful PC and its better video processor (probably with a TBC);
• I could try a third party, although I haven't had outstanding success with other things in the past (I suppose you get what you pay for).
• I could put much more effort into learning several new software apps in order to optimise image quality.

I must confess that I usually lean towards higher quality outcomes, and it might make more sense anyway given that it usually takes me at least a full day to do a rudimentary editing job with titles, cross-fades, and so on (I've never even contemplated things like colour correction) - there's not much point in putting effort into editing if the raw material is less than optimal. I suspect that I probably will spring for the AVT-8710.

I'll do some experiments today and go from there. Thanks again, you guys are amazing!

[yoda313]

Just to note if you have an external harddrive that you can move from computer to computer you can capture on one computer and copy the saved file to the other more powerful computer.

[Emdubya]

Yes, I have a "network accessible storage device". I bought it originally for back-up protection, but it's very handy for moving files between computers, especially when the files are big or the computers are scattered around the house. It also means that I don't have to have enormous hard discs on every computer. For video editing, I intend keeping the files on the NAS and working on them from a networked PC.

[TimA-C]

You'll find it horribly slow trying to edit files on a NAS drive - even on a gigabit network.

[Emdubya]

You'll find it horribly slow trying to edit files on a NAS drive - even on a gigabit network.

Oh, thanks for the tip! I'll re-think that one, but at the moment I'm not even getting a successful capture using my "quick and dirty" option....

[Emdubya]

Well, I've had a fruitless and very frustrating day. I spent most of it trying to capture video via the S-video output of my friend's VCR, but to no avail. I got absolutely nowhere. I then reverted to the composite video output on my old Sharp VCR and got a monochrome video capture but no audio (although I was getting audio through my computer speakers). This was using Adobe Premiere to do the capture.

I then abandoned Premiere and tried capturing through the ATI All-in-Wonder card (there's a misnomer if ever there was one). All I could get was a "no capture driver" message. After several hours of searching, installing, and re-installing video card drivers, I was no further ahead.

I have to return my friend's VCR this evening, but I'm out of patience anyway. Looks like it's time to try virtual dub.

[TimA-C]

Try downloading the latest redistribution of MS DirectX. Yeah, I know it sounds strange, especially since you've probably already got 9.0c installed . . . I could not get Ulead/Corel VideoStudio to talk to my capture card (or it might have been the Canon DV Camcorder, I can't remember now) and, like you, had spent hours installing and re-installing drivers etc. Eventually found a post on a site somewhere suggesting this . . and it worked! Must have either had some missing or outdated files.

As far as I'm aware the last redist was June last year and can be found here.

[Emdubya]

Thanks, Tim. I'll try that this evening after I'm home from work (looks like you're eight time zones ahead of me).

M

[Emdubya]

Well, I think I've now isolated the problem (it wasn't DirectX). I've tried two methods of capturing from VHS tapes in my old VCR: the first was through my DV camcorder, and the second was through my ATI video card.

For the first method, I've now demonstrated that every link in the chain works as it should individually, and have come to the conclusion that the problem is the cable from the VCR to the camcorder. The VRC has only composite video out, and the camcorder has only S-video in, so I used an off-the-shelf cable to adapt one to the other. It would appear that this doesn't convert properly, at least not in the composite to S-video direction. This is probably obvious to those in the know, but it wasn't to me. This means that I couldn't have used this method when I captured a couple of tapes some years ago, but must have used the video card (although I'm still not 100% convinced of this).

With the video card, I have failed miserably to resolve the "no capture driver" issue. However, on reflection I suspect that when I did those captures some years ago I had an nVidea card in my machine. I moved that card to my wife's machine when some numbskull in the computer store recommended the All-in-Wonder as an up-grade (I've cursed him ever since). I suppose I could swap the cards between the two machines, but they are both old now and I could have more driver support problems if something goes wrong. I'll probably give it a try sometime, but it's all eating into my limited spare time.

So...I've decided to send my tapes with the greatest sentimental value to a transfer house. I've been 'phoning around and have spoken to lots of folk who appear to know no more than I do, but I did find one outfit in Ontario that seems to know what it's doing so I'm going to use them. They will convert the tapes to AVIs and put them on an external HDD for me so that I can edit them later at my leisure. They're going to do some old Standard 8 cine films for me at the same time (another project I've been fretting over for some time). I might be able to borrow one of those VHS/DVD all-in-one machines to deal with the odds and sods, or I can try the video card swap.

This approach will deal with my immediate worry about VHS tapes that are 20 years old, while allowing me time to put off the actual editing until next winter when I might have more time. It might be a good opportunity to replace Adobe Premiere with something that will run on my more powerful PC as well. The downside is that I'll have to throw a significant amount of cash at the tranfser house, but I can live with that as long as they do a good job.

So thanks for all your advice - I seem to be acting on quite a lot of it to varying extents and I've certainly learned a lot in the process. I'll be following up on your software recommendations when I get to the editing stage.

Oh, one last question: Yoda recommended using Taiyo Yuden discs. There seems to be about a dozen different kinds...and that's just for DVD-R discs! Is there one that stands out?

[Nelson37]

Did you try using the MMC software packaged with the AIW card? Other capture softwares often will not work with ATI cards, and/or do not give access to all the features.

As for the editing, having watched several 50-year-old family videos, my advice would be to cut Absolutely Nothing. Most of the more interesting parts of the video would have been left on the cutting room floor, literally as this stuff was edited with a razor blade. If you want to edit, add voice commentary as to who these people are, what year, and where.

[Emdubya]

The MMC with this board appears to lack a capturing function. A Pinnacle application was bundled with it, but I've never loaded it (I have a low opinion of bundled software).

I've spent far too much time struggling with this card now. It's always been difficult to get along with, so this is the end of the line (and the last time I buy anything from ATI). I shipped my critical tapes and film to the transfer house today; I'll look for an acceptable alternative to the ATI/Adobe situation later. I think the longer-term solution is Linux for me and a Mac for my wife!

[yoda313]

@emdubya - have you considered an external capture box from pinnacle? That would be an easy alternative.

Also are you just going to give up on tape capturing on your own? If so than you will have no need for a capture device at all. Just get a graphics card that you want without a capture mode in it.

[Emdubya]

Hi, Yoda.

No, I never give up! However, I have given up on capturing on my old XP PC. Rather than buying a capturing device, I'm going to buy a new video editing package that will run on my new, much more powerful W7 machine - I'm considering Cyberlink PowerDirector 9 which seems to get good reviews; Asus recommends Cyberlink PowerDVD for playback with my motherboard, so I have high hopes that it will do a good job. My board is their M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 which I chose for its low power consumption and its 890GX/SB850 chip-set (good on-board video without the power-drain and fan noise of a separate video card). Of course, I wasn't intending using this for video capture and editing, but I think it will work for DV capture (via Firewire) and editing.

I'm dealing with my seven critial home video VHS tapes through the transfer house; this leaves a handful of VHS tapes of less sentimental value - I'll be less demanding on the image quailty with these, but I still haven't decided on the solution for dealing with them yet! I might be able to do the capture with my wife's XP machine (although it will be rather slow) and then edit on mine, but I haven't investigated this yet.

Any comments on the Cyberlink product and alternatives, or on alternatives to this plan will be welcome!